The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus)
Diego Velazquez (1599 to 1660) · 1647 to 1651
Venus lies on her side with her back to us, resting on grey silk and a crimson drape, while her son Cupid holds up a mirror. Her face appears only as a blurred reflection in the glass, and it seems to look back at the viewer rather than at herself. There is no jewellery, no myth, no attendant beyond the boy, just a woman, a bed and a mirror. It is the only surviving female nude by Velazquez, painted in a Spain where the Inquisition frowned on such pictures.
The handling is astonishingly free. The body is built from long, soft strokes of pearl, rose and grey, with hardly any outline, and the ribbon that Cupid holds is a few loose flicks of pink. The mirror image is deliberately vague, painted so thinly that you cannot quite fix the features, which makes her expression change as you move. Velazquez borrowed the reclining pose from Venetian painting, from Titian and Giorgione, but turned the figure away from us, which was almost unheard of.
The painting was probably made for a young courtier and collector, the Marquis of Carpio, and later belonged to the Godoy family in Madrid. It came to England in 1813 and hung for nearly a century at Rokeby Park in Yorkshire, which gave it its nickname. In 1906 it was bought for the nation by public subscription. Eight years later the suffragette Mary Richardson slashed it with a meat cleaver in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst; the cuts were repaired so well that you have to search for them.
Did You Know? The mirror does not obey the laws of optics: from where Venus lies, it should reflect her body, not her face, and Velazquez knew it.
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