Venus blindfolding Cupid

There is no established information on the commissioning of the painting, which can be dated around 1565: neither documentary nor from contemporary biographers. Not everyone agrees with the hypothesis that the work was intended for Antonio Pérez, the later disgraced secretary of state of Philip II, who owned a “quadro de la diosa Venus Ventando Los ojos A su hijo cupido y otras ninfas q le traen presentes.” However, critics have always considered this “painting,” recorded without indication of the author in Pérez’s inventory, as a (lost) copy of the canvas now in the Galleria Borghese, one of the replicas and variants of the successful Titian inventions fired by the workshop.  

The first certain mention of the work is Roman, and already in the Borghese house. In 1613 it was extensively illustrated by Scipione Francucci in his Galleria and, it seems, equipped with a new frame (Annibale Durante’s account for “una cornice indorata con li fogliami di rilievo intagliati data di vernice e sui filetti dorati serve per il quadro di Tiziano in Sala longa 8 alta 6”). Such early evidence of the presence of Venus blindfolding Cupid in the Borghese picture gallery suggested that it might have been part of the Sfondrato sale (1608), but without any certainty. 

During his stay in Rome, between 1622 and 1623, Van Dyck depicted the painting in his sketchbook (London, British Museum), probably in the villa where it is certainly attested in 1650. Like much of the picture gallery, in the second half of the seventeenth century this canvas was also moved to the family palace in Ripetta: in the villa outside Porta Pinciana it would be replaced by a copy, recorded by Domenico Montelatici in 1700. Apart from the Turin and Parisian passage in the retinue of Prince Camillo and Paolina Bonaparte between 1808 and 1816, it will be kept in the palace until the end of the 19th century. By 1891 it was already back in the villa: it would remain there, leaving the building for temporary exhibitions (the first in 1935), and during the war, transferred safely to the Marche and the Vatican.

The painting depicts three female figures and two Loves. On the left sits a woman dressed in white and adorned with gems, jewelry and pearls, identified with Venus; she is depicted in the act of barely turning toward a Cupid who leans on her shoulder. In the centre, a second Cupid hides his head between the knees of the goddess, who is busy holding the edges of a ribbon with which Cupid is blindfolded. To the right, two women carry bows and arrows, similarly dressed: the one in the foreground has her hair down and shows a bare breast. 

The scene has always been difficult to interpret: in the inventories of the Borghese collection the identification of the women as the “Three Graces” prevails over time, while in the late nineteenth century the designation of Venus blindfolding Cupid seems to be preferred. More complex readings were advanced during the twentieth century, and special mention should be made of the indispensable iconological essays by Erwin Panofsky (1939 and 1969) that influenced many generations of scholars. It is Panofsky who introduced a neo-Platonic interpretation of the painting, identified the two cupids as Eros and Anteros (i.e., passionate, blind Love and divine, rational, elevated Love), and advanced the hypothesis that the painting is an allegory of conjugal love in which Venus plays the role of protector of marital happiness. Critics today generally agree on this reading of the painting from a marital perspective: a Titian invention around the already practiced themes of conjugal love, which, wisely controlled by Venus, must strike a balance between Anteros and Eros, between a divine, rational love and an earthly, blindfolded one. The suspended gesture of Venus, who holds the flaps of the yellow-coloured ribbon well in evidence but performs neither the action of tightening the blindfold nor undoing it, is still a visible sign of regulated restraint, moreover placed by Titian in the centre of the composition. Venus assumes the qualities of the bride, and wears her dress and attributes. She remains, however, on an elevated, non-worldly plane: perhaps for reasons related to a commission no longer carried through, Titian mutates an earlier idea, visible through the X-ray, in which the woman was fitted with an elegant feathered hat. 

If Venus embodies the allegory of marriage, the two female figures (otherwise identified as nymphs or Graces) carry and offer the weapons of Love and their virginal nudity. 

The composition is clear and symmetrical, balanced, as Love must be in this marriage allegory. To achieve this result Titian further modifies an earlier composition (visible in infrared reflectography) that included a third figure: a woman, it seems, holding aloft a tray or basket, i.e., a type much used in the production of these years. Made well beyond the sketch phase, indeed sufficiently finished, it was deleted because it was evidently no longer functional to the allegorical meaning the master was defining. 

In the search for balance, and in the elimination of a figure, Titian also recovers a landscape, albeit in the background, to which, however, he confers the dignity of a central position, giving it the role of a pause, almost uninhabited, and immobile, like the high mountains, his own, in the ultimate limit of the painting.