Toilet of Venus

Venus sits on an ornate carved and gilt throne, her sandaled foot resting on two red velvet, tasseled cushions. Three young women—the Graces—attend the goddess, along with her progeny, a trio of winged cupids. The Grace at far left dangles a strand of pearls, engaging her sister who is combing a long tress of Venus’s fair hair, while the third maiden at center is intent on curling one of her locks. Kneeling at the foot of the throne, a cupid supports a mirror on which the goddess focuses her gaze.

The subject and general composition of the Toilet of Venus appear repeatedly in Francesco Albani’s art. Drawing on ancient and Renaissance poetry, themes portraying Venus and Cupid enjoyed great popularity in sixteenth and seventeenth-century art, their representation evoking love, beauty and fertility. As the goddess of beauty, Venus embodied ideal female attributes, celebrated in Petrarchan love poetry that often played with the topos of the mirror¹. An indispensable literary source for artists was Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini de gli dei delli antichi, first published in the mid-sixteenth century and frequently reprinted thereafter, which supplied an exhaustive compendium of references to ancient authors and imagery for each of the pagan gods². His manual recounts that in antiquity new brides received pictures of Venus with the Graces and cupids as tokens of best wishes for a harmonious and loving marriage. In imitation of ancient practices, paintings with Venus and Cupid decorated bedrooms during the Renaissance. Although Homer’s Odyssey (8, 266-366) has been cited in the past as a literary source for representations of the toilet of Venus, his brief description lacks the details found in Albani’s and others’ representations³. Instead the immediate text shaping Albani’s and Annibale Carracci’s imagery was an ancient wedding poem, the Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria, verses (ll. 99-106), that Cartari translated into Italian from the Latin of the late classical poet Claudian. Claudian’s passage paints a word picture of the toilet of Venus, here cited in the English translation of the Loeb Classical Library:

Venus was seated on her glittering throne, tiring her hair. On her right and on her left stood the Idalian sisters (the Graces). Of these one pours a rich stream of nectar over Venus’ head, another parts her hair with a fine ivory comb. A third, standing behind the goddess, braids her tresses and orders her ringlets in due array yet carefully leaving a part untended, such negligence becomes her more. Nor did her face lack the mirror’s verdict…

Albani, reputed a poetic and learned painter, would have been familiar with Claudian’s poem from Cartari’s translation, a work for which the famous Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino created a modern gloss in his lyric poem, the Adone, already underway from the first decade of the seventeenth century, and in his own later epithalamium for the marriage of two Genoese nobles⁴. Marino embroidered on Claudian and sat Venus and her attendants under the shade of a luxuriant oak tree, a setting Albani pictured in his tondo in the Galleria Borghese, as well as in the present canvas and that in Madrid⁵. Both the poet and painter likely met in Rome where Albani could have read an early version of the Adone⁶. As the painter’s biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia observed, Albani’s image and Marino’s verses presented pictorial and literary counterparts, an exemplar of the humanistic theory ut pictura poesis⁷. The inclusion in their portrayals of many putti and their activities also derives from Cartari’s manual which explains that love is not singular but assumes diverse forms that ancient poets expressed with multiple cupids described as most beautiful curly-haired infants, nude, tender, soft and delicate⁸.

In conceiving the scene, Albani found inspiration, too, in the visual tradition. An understanding of the canvas under discussion can best be reached by examining closely its composition and content in the context of the artist’s several renditions of the theme, in comparison with contemporary depictions by Guercino and Guido Reni, and in light of Albani’s pictorial precedents in the art of Titian and Annibale Carracci. Titian’s Venus with a Mirror, c. 1555, today in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (fig. 1), circulated in numerous replicas and offered a model for many painters⁹. The Venetian artist’s sensuous image centers on the three-quarter length goddess admiring herself in a mirror held up by two cupids, the figures filling the frame. Titian’s and more generally Venetian coloring and loose brushwork deeply influenced the Carracci’s historic reform of painting at the end of the sixteenth century that reinvigorated the then prevailing Mannerist aesthetic with a modern art predicated on direct study of the human figure and the surrounding environment. Annibale clearly paid attention to Titian’s Venus with a Mirror when he created Venus Adorned by the Graces, ca. 1594-1595 (fig. 2)¹⁰. Most influentially for Albani, Annibale transformed Titian’s portrayal into a narrative outdoors. Widening the view to a horizontal composition with a large cast of full-length figures, Annibale pictures Venus’s adornment in progress, the Graces and cupids each busy at their tasks with secondary figures seated in the middleground behind a large fountain crowned by a statue of Bacchus. Albani was a pupil in the Carracci workshop and likely watched his master’s progress on the canvas. Its arrangement of the principal figures and insertion of a landscape provided the closest visual precedent for his exploration of the theme in at least seven depictions spanning his decades-long career that were painted in diverse circumstances.

Albani’s two earliest known representations date to about 1610, at the end of his first decade in Rome. Whereas Annibale himself likely guided the design of the first of the two, the small canvas now in Bologna (fig. 3), Albani appropriated the poses of Annibale’s goddess and the handmaiden curling her hair for the second, the fresco in Bassano Romano (fig. 4). As the latter holds less visual importance for our Toilet of Venus than the Bologna painting, a few words about it first. Albani’s fresco forms part of the decoration of the main hall of the Palazzo Giustiniani outside the capital in Bassano Romano, the feudal seat of the wealthy banker and distinguished art patron and connoisseur, Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani¹¹. Changing Annibale’s horizontal design into a vertical composition, Albani invented an episode featuring the toilet of Venus that elaborates on Ovid’s myth of Phaeton, the theme of the Giustiniani decoration. One of the Graces has replaced Cupid in holding the mirror, while her two other companions react dramatically to the fall of Phaeton illustrated on the frescoed vault above. Departing from Annibale’s precedent, as well as Titian’s and other earlier renditions, Albani did not portray the goddess as partially nude but clothed her and the Graces, likely respecting his patron’s wishes.

Albani’s canvas in Bologna instead established the template for his five subsequent versions of the theme, including our painting. Given that Albani’s Bologna canvas was probably painted to be paired with Annibale’s earlier Landscape with Diana and Callisto, a sketch by the master perhaps supplied the general design¹². Albani executed the work during the period after 1605 when he assumed responsibility for projects Annibale left unfinished when he became too ill to work. Reduced in size, the principal figural group of Annibale’s Venus Adorned by the Graces reappears in reverse, alongside other changes and new motifs¹³. Having alit in a landscape, the fully nude Venus sits in a chariot, two cupids soar in flight, one bearing a vase of flowers and the other showering blossoms on the goddess, and in the left foreground an elaborate fountain adorned with satyrs balances the figures on the right. Albani’s later depictions essentially adopt this schema, varying the extent of landscape and inventing novel details to avoid any potential charge of repetition. His satisfaction with the primary figural group in the Bologna canvas manifested itself a year or two later, c. 1611-1612, in the Palazzo Verospi, Rome. There he reused the scene of the toilet in a third representation, albeit abbreviated, in one of the spandrels (fig. 5) on the frescoed vault depicting the Allegory of Time¹⁴.

During the 1620s when he had resettled in Bologna, Albani fashioned his most original treatments—his fourth and fifth representations—of the Venus theme in two renowned mythological cycles, the first a set of four roundels commissioned by the art loving, powerful papal nephew Cardinal Scipione Borghese for its present location in the Villa Borghese in Rome, and the second set of four ordered by Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga of Mantua, now in the Louvre¹⁵. The classical subject combined with the display of ideal female beauty held great appeal for cultured patrons, such as Cardinal Borghese and Duke Ferdinando. Inserting the episode into a series allowed Albani to develop a larger narrative told across four canvases, Venus the protagonist in two and the goddess Diana in the other two, implying a confrontation between carnal love and chastity and the moral need for the latter to restrain the former.

Executed circa 1617, the Borghese roundel of the Venus theme (fig. 6) marks the artist’s development of a personal idiom, drawing to be sure on his own Bologna canvas but fashioning a new image by weaving together ideas from multiple sources: Annibale’s Venus Adorned by the Graces; his Sleeping Venus (Chantilly, Musée Condé), and Titian’s Bacchanal of the Worship of Venus, featuring a throng of playful putti. In Rome from 1598, Titian’s work inspired Annibale and made a great impact on Albani and the other Carracci pupils, who lamented its shipment initially to Naples and then onto Madrid, where it now hangs in the Prado¹⁶. In the Borghese Toilet of Venus, Albani achieved a harmonious balance of petite, refined figures and a lush, ideal landscape. Payments for frames in October 1622 imply the cycle went on view in the villa by that time, a year and half into the new papacy of Gregory XV Ludovisi. Keenly aware of the importance of a superb art collection for affirming high social status, the Ludovisi strove to match Borghese patronage, acquiring Titian’s Worship of Venus and commissioning contemporary works like Guercino’s Toilet of Venus (fig. 7)¹⁷. Thirteen years younger than Albani, Guercino came from the town of Cento near Bologna, closely studying the Carracci’s art in his formative years before moving to Rome to serve Pope Gregory and the Ludovisi family from 1621 to 1623. Larger in dimensions than Albani’s Borghese roundel and with full-sized figures, Guercino’s Toilet of Venus also drew on Annibale’s prototype and, moreover, on Titian’s Worship of Venus. Like Albani and perhaps stimulated by his example, Guercino portrayed Venus surrounded by cupids and adopted saturated Venetian coloring in his sole representation of the theme.

Albani’s Toilet of Venus for the duke of Mantua (the Louvre cycle) originated in the commission for a fresco decoration of two rooms in the Villa Favorita. In Mantua from late summer 1621, the artist was designing cartoons that presumably included this scene. Around the same time, Ferdinando ordered an oil painting of the subject from Albani’s compatriot Guido Reni, the duke’s request for two representations of the theme perhaps spurred by his marriage to Caterina de’ Medici (1593-1629) in 1617. Reni had also trained in the Carracci Academy and by the 1620s supervised the other major workshop in Bologna, enjoying an exalted reputation. In an erotic image promoting fertility (fig. 8), Reni’s depiction of the theme narrows the focus to the life-size figures, showing the goddess leaning back with opened legs as if having generated the cupid standing between them¹⁸. When Albani abandoned the Mantuan fresco project and returned to Bologna, he switched from fresco to oil for canvases for the duke based on the existing cartoons. As documented in letters between Ferdinando and his agent in Bologna, the timing strongly suggests that Albani and Reni saw each other’s pictures in progress, stimulating rival interpretations of the theme that take as a starting point Annibale’s Venus Adorned by the Graces. Albani’s cycle, however, was not shipped to Mantua before Ferdinando’s death in 1626 and was only completed in 1633 for Cardinal Gian Carlo de’ Medici. Whereas Reni’s painting, his only known treatment of the subject, would have elicited praise for the ideal beauty of the figures’ heads, his famous “arie di teste,” Albani’s poetic evocation of classical mythology and sweet putti enchanted his viewers.

Albani’s Toilet of Venus of the Louvre cycle (fig. 9) repurposed the same figural group from his early Bologna canvas, inserting it into a variant composition of larger dimensions and modifying slightly poses and accessories. Unfolding on the terrace of a grand classical portico, the setting alludes to Venus’s palace on the island of Cyprus, its façade perhaps evoked in the view of a grand building surrounded by water in the middle ground. Distinguishing the goddess and her attendants from their portrayal in the Borghese roundel, Venus reposes on a plush red velvet cushion atop a golden throne, a gauzy gold dress and fluttering purple mantle respectively garb the two Graces behind her, and a vase with flowers rests on the table at far left. These three new compositional details inform Albani’s further reinterpretation of the theme in his last two known autograph versions, datable to the end of the 1630s or beginning of the 1640s, the canvas now the Prado (fig. 10) and in that under discussion.

Closely related in composition and date, but slightly different in size, the Madrid canvas and the one under discussion, epitomize Albani’s production of classical subjects with graceful nude and seminude women accompanied by charming, lively putti for an elite and international clientele in the later decades of his career¹⁹. Priding himself on his inventiveness, he asserted in letters that any version of a given subject in progress or just completed did not repeat but differed from the previous. To judge from the visual evidence, his strategy to satisfy demand and facilitate output consisted of transferring the matrix of the principal figural group onto the latest canvas, probably via a sketch preserved in the studio. This reflects similar workshop practices devised by other contemporary painters including Reni, who used cartoons and tracings to transfer designs mechanically²⁰. Furthermore, when Albani’s brother’s death in 1646 left him with a substantial debt, his need to boost income led him to delegate assistants with copying successful compositions, generating workshop replicas to distinguish them from autograph variants such as our painting and that of the Prado. Albani perhaps worked on these two canvases at the same time in the studio, intending each for separate clients.

Characteristic of our painting is the centering of the figures in the composition, their enlarged scale within the frame to give them visual prominence. Two leafy trees framing the action and a distant view of mountains only form a backdrop for the staging of the scene on a terrace, whose inlaid marble floor and the pedestal of a monumental column swathed in a curtain at left evoke the goddess’s palace. Perched on a tree branch above, a pair of Venus’s birds, turtle doves, kiss. Albani lavished care on the accessories of the toilet, some the same as in the Prado canvas and others freshly conceived. The fountain in the Prado version is omitted, and a small circular table at right (at left in the Prado version) displays gleaming pearl earrings and a gold chain dangling off its edge. The tall box from which a cupid has pulled an ivory comb here also contains ivory hair pins, and the vase of flowers, apparently silver with a gilded design, holds roses and orange blossoms, the former symbolic of Venus and the latter associated with matrimony. Carved on the back of the goddess’s throne, a mythical creature, half female and half animal, twists her head to look up towards Venus, as if animate and enthralled by the goddess’s allure. Whereas a cupid ties Venus’s sandal in both the Louvre canvas and the Prado painting, that motif is replaced by a cupid hugging a second vase decorated with a relief figure of a woman holding a spear and shield, identifiable as Minerva, perhaps implying love’s power over the goddess of warfare. These significant but small variations surely signal Albani’s responsibility for the work, confirmed by the adept execution of the figures’ heads and delicate curls, the highlights on the gold dress of the Grace in the middle emblazoned with a jewel on her neckline, and the crimson lined violet mantle of the Grace at left. Its original patron has not been identified, the canvas spoken of here must have hung in private homes for centuries until its re-emergence on the art market in 2018 and subsequent entry into its current location.