Venus' milkshake brings Vulcan to the yard...

...and a bunch of other guys, too. Venus is a sexually liberated woman. Wanted an open relationship. Vulcan is a little more vanilla, like 1950s vanilla (maybe 1950s in Utah, if you have to consider his second wife Maia). He's looking for Venus to be the kind of wife that has the pot roast ready at 5:30 PM sharp when he gets home from a hard day of managing the world's forge. But that ain't her. She's up at 3 PM, off to another party with her friends to find a couple guys on the side. Whenever Vulcan finds out about one of his wife's flings, a volcano erupts. Maybe it's the angry make-up sex that keeps them together. You can hope the room doesn't smell like sulfur and low tide afterward...but it probably does.

Spranger's Venus is pretty typical of the artist's other nude women. He usually put women's hair done up, and tresses billowing about (as with our Venus) when they're getting ready for naked time. As if that was difficult to figure out, anyway, with their birthday suits and all. Their entwined pose is also per usual Spranger, who could have made a greatest hits album solely off his works with nude lovers about to put on the Barry White and go sexual spelunking.

Spranger wasn't a perv or anything. I guess, maybe, but that's not something we know. Making nearly porn was all his friends' idea. By the time Bartholomeus is churning out centerfolds like cops filing out of a donut shop, he's in the employ of Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Rudolf was a bit eccentric, in that for every fine artist or scientist he had in court, he'd also have someone from the occult there to give him advice. Metaphysics, astrology, and ancient religions all had their place alongside painting and geometry in Rudolf's crazy Prague court. It was an anything goes kind of place. As court painter to dysfunctionally functional Rudolf, Spranger was encouraged to just let it all hang out. And clearly, if Vulcan's any indication, everything in fact did hang out. Even if there wasn't much of it. Just saying, it ain't cold in the bottom of a volcano.

Vulcan is the God of Fire, not Vulcan the race of extraterrestrials made famous by Mr. Spock in Star Trek.

Vulcan was married to Venus, which was convenient for her, because as part of the whole god of fire gig, Vulcan also got to be the god of anything that was produced using fire, including jewelry.