Lorenzo Lotto creates weird symbolism with Venus and Cupid

Believe it or not, this is actually a wedding gift. The face of the bride is believed to be painted onto Venus’ body. As in modern times, the wedding is all about the bride and so is this painting. Academics aren’t sure if Cupid’s face is the fiancé or if that’s just the ugliest child in the world. But the face is definitely of a real life person, and Lotto basically painted everything else and then painted in the faces once he got a commission. According to some that was Lotto's specialty; he’d sit around with a bunch of nearly finished paintings waiting for a wedding and charge them 100% more than what he would for a not-wedding to paint in the faces of the happy couple. Sounds like the wedding industry hasn’t changed much. 

These fill-in-the-face wedding paintings were a common wedding gift. They would hang above the wedding bed and maybe there’d be a curtain over it, but the idea was that you look at it while you were having sex based on the extremely scientific belief that if you looked at something beautiful while you were having sex, the beauty would go in the man’s eyes, through his body, out his sperm, and into the woman and that the babies would be beautiful. I don’t know what happened to these babies, but, you know, science. 

Art history is all about symbolism and this painting actually has some fun stuff in it. The BDSM ties around Venus’ chest and wrist represent the eternity of marriage and that she’s now bound to her husband. The clinging ivy on the tree mirrors how the wife will now cling to her husband, very pro-feminism the Renaissance. The color of the ribbon is a specific shade of blue reserved for representing virginity and would often be used to easily spot the the Virgin Mary. Going off the Biblical symbolism the snake is obviously temptation, but with the stick they can beat temptations away together.   

While we have two naked people here everybody was naked during the Renaissance making this no big deal. You know what the big deal was? The fact that Venus only has on one earring. Anytime you see a woman with only one of an item usually worn in pairs (earrings, shoes, socks, gloves), it means that she’s a lady in the streets and a freak in the sheets and is always ready to go. 

The painting you have before you didn’t always look this way. When it first arrived at the Met, it looked slightly different. Cupid was holding a little nosegay, which is a little bouquet of flowers that gentlemen used to give women back before people showered frequently so that they wouldn’t have to smell each other and his pee was edited out. Venus’ crotch was covered with, of all things, a bit of fur. Conservators scanned the work and found out the nosegay and fur were not part of the original piece and restored it back to its original state.

Written with assistance from Lia Tambora of Museum Hack