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Pardo Venus
The Pardo Venus is a painting by the Venetian artist Titian, completed in 1551 and now in the Louvre Museum. It is also known as Jupiter and Antiope, since it seems to show the story of Jupiter and Antiope from Book VI of the Metamorphoses (lines 110-111). It is Titian's largest mythological painting, and was the first major mythological painting produced by the artist for Philip II of Spain. It was long kept in the Royal Palace of El Pardo near Madrid (not to be confused with the Prado, a purpose-built museum), hence its usual name; whether Venus is actually represented is uncertain. It later belonged to the English and French royal collections.
Analysis of its style and composition shows that Titian modified a Bacchanalian scene he had begun much earlier in his career by completing the landscape background and adding figures. For Sydney Freedberg it was "probably in substance an invention of the later 1530s, though significantly reworked later; it is full of motifs and ideas that have been recollected from an earlier and more Giorgionesque time, ordered in an obvious and uncomplicated classicizing scheme."
Though, if Antiope is the nude, the painting meets the basic definition of Titian's poesie series, mythological scenes from Ovid painted for Philip II, the painting is typically not counted in the series, either as it was begun well before Titian used the term in a letter to the Spanish King, or because the nude is indeed Venus, in which case no such scene is described by Ovid.
As to the subject, Titian himself appears to describe it simply as "the landscape", and his son Orazio calls it "the nude woman with the landscape and the satyr", both in letters to Philip II, but later an inventory of El Pardo calls it "Jupiter and Antiope". In Madrid in the 1620s, Vicente Carducho (d. 1638, see below) referred to its subject as "Antiope and some shepherds and satyrs on a large canvas". In the correspondence of the French and Spanish ambassadors as Charles I's collection was being sold in 1649-53, the nude is "Venus". Malcolm Bull observed: "In later inventories the terms "naked woman" and "Venus" are almost interchangeable", and the presence of her son Cupid an uncertain indicator, as he often appears with other people.
The painting is very large, and the figures somewhat disconnected, the composition divided into two by the tree at centre. In the right foreground we have a scene that would have been familiar to well-educated Renaissance viewers as Jupiter, having taken the form of a satyr, creeping up on the sleeping nymph Antiope, and lifting her drapery to view her naked. He will shortly rape her. Possibly the situation is only borrowed from this story, but all Titian's other mythological paintings for Philip show scenes from Ovid, where Antiope's story features (Metamorphoses, VI, 110-111). Scenes of satyr voyeurism or sexual assault, given titles such as Nymph Surprised by a Satyr, are found in art, mostly later than this, but only a very rash satyr would treat the goddess Venus in this way. The painting can be compared to his The Bacchanal of the Andrians of 1523-24 (Prado), where an apparently unconscious nude in a version of the Dresden Venus pose shares the picture space with a group of revellers in a mixture of nudity, contemporary and classical dress.
Venus or Antiope sleeps as yet undisturbed, not only by the voyeur, but a hunting scene above her, where hounds have brought down a stag, and immediately left of her, a satyr or faun with the legs of a goat seated on the ground, in conversation with a lady in contemporary dress. Immediately beside them stands a hunter, with large dogs, and at far left another huntsman blows a horn.
Over Venus' head, Cupid perches in a tree, with an arrow in his bow, apparently pointed at Jupiter. In the middle distance a naked couple, apparently both women, talk or kiss on the banks of a river. The river has a wide waterfall above the stag, and presumably then flows above the conversing couple before perhaps circling round behind the viewer to create the water behind the Jupiter/satyr, but this is not shown clearly, which is rather typical of Titian. To the right, the landscape includes a contemporary farmhouse at the top of the rise, and a distant settlement dominated by a church tower and steeple. Distant mountains complete the view, which like many Titian landscapes reflects the country between Venice and his hometown of Pieve di Cadore in the mountains, though he does not seem to have closely depicted specific locations.
Art historians have struggled somewhat in trying to find a coherent meaning for these disparate elements. Their incongruous combination makes it something of a test case for a long-running dispute over the extent to which Titian's mythological paintings (and to some extent those of Venetian painters in general) carry "great complexity of allegorical meanings", in the way that some works of other Renaissance artists are generally accepted to do.
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Pardo Venus
The Pardo Venus is a painting by the Venetian artist Titian, completed in 1551 and now in the Louvre Museum. It is also known as Jupiter and Antiope, since it seems to show the story of Jupiter and Antiope from Book VI of the Metamorphoses (lines 110-111). It is Titian's largest mythological painting, and was the first major mythological painting produced by the artist for Philip II of Spain. It was long kept in the Royal Palace of El Pardo near Madrid (not to be confused with the Prado, a purpose-built museum), hence its usual name; whether Venus is actually represented is uncertain. It later belonged to the English and French royal collections.
Analysis of its style and composition shows that Titian modified a Bacchanalian scene he had begun much earlier in his career by completing the landscape background and adding figures. For Sydney Freedberg it was "probably in substance an invention of the later 1530s, though significantly reworked later; it is full of motifs and ideas that have been recollected from an earlier and more Giorgionesque time, ordered in an obvious and uncomplicated classicizing scheme."
Though, if Antiope is the nude, the painting meets the basic definition of Titian's poesie series, mythological scenes from Ovid painted for Philip II, the painting is typically not counted in the series, either as it was begun well before Titian used the term in a letter to the Spanish King, or because the nude is indeed Venus, in which case no such scene is described by Ovid.
As to the subject, Titian himself appears to describe it simply as "the landscape", and his son Orazio calls it "the nude woman with the landscape and the satyr", both in letters to Philip II, but later an inventory of El Pardo calls it "Jupiter and Antiope". In Madrid in the 1620s, Vicente Carducho (d. 1638, see below) referred to its subject as "Antiope and some shepherds and satyrs on a large canvas". In the correspondence of the French and Spanish ambassadors as Charles I's collection was being sold in 1649-53, the nude is "Venus". Malcolm Bull observed: "In later inventories the terms "naked woman" and "Venus" are almost interchangeable", and the presence of her son Cupid an uncertain indicator, as he often appears with other people.
The painting is very large, and the figures somewhat disconnected, the composition divided into two by the tree at centre. In the right foreground we have a scene that would have been familiar to well-educated Renaissance viewers as Jupiter, having taken the form of a satyr, creeping up on the sleeping nymph Antiope, and lifting her drapery to view her naked. He will shortly rape her. Possibly the situation is only borrowed from this story, but all Titian's other mythological paintings for Philip show scenes from Ovid, where Antiope's story features (Metamorphoses, VI, 110-111). Scenes of satyr voyeurism or sexual assault, given titles such as Nymph Surprised by a Satyr, are found in art, mostly later than this, but only a very rash satyr would treat the goddess Venus in this way. The painting can be compared to his The Bacchanal of the Andrians of 1523-24 (Prado), where an apparently unconscious nude in a version of the Dresden Venus pose shares the picture space with a group of revellers in a mixture of nudity, contemporary and classical dress.
Venus or Antiope sleeps as yet undisturbed, not only by the voyeur, but a hunting scene above her, where hounds have brought down a stag, and immediately left of her, a satyr or faun with the legs of a goat seated on the ground, in conversation with a lady in contemporary dress. Immediately beside them stands a hunter, with large dogs, and at far left another huntsman blows a horn.
Over Venus' head, Cupid perches in a tree, with an arrow in his bow, apparently pointed at Jupiter. In the middle distance a naked couple, apparently both women, talk or kiss on the banks of a river. The river has a wide waterfall above the stag, and presumably then flows above the conversing couple before perhaps circling round behind the viewer to create the water behind the Jupiter/satyr, but this is not shown clearly, which is rather typical of Titian. To the right, the landscape includes a contemporary farmhouse at the top of the rise, and a distant settlement dominated by a church tower and steeple. Distant mountains complete the view, which like many Titian landscapes reflects the country between Venice and his hometown of Pieve di Cadore in the mountains, though he does not seem to have closely depicted specific locations.
Art historians have struggled somewhat in trying to find a coherent meaning for these disparate elements. Their incongruous combination makes it something of a test case for a long-running dispute over the extent to which Titian's mythological paintings (and to some extent those of Venetian painters in general) carry "great complexity of allegorical meanings", in the way that some works of other Renaissance artists are generally accepted to do.
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