February Art: love
For this Saint Valentine’s Day (also Ash Wednesday, but see yesterday’s Giotto led penitence), February Art celebrates love – but not the uncomplicated holding-hands type. No, Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid (1545) is after something wilder and weirder. Scholars agree this is an allegory, but can’t agree of what.
One face screams in pain, another is brainlessly mask-like, and while Vasari ascribes these to Jealousy and Fraud, what to make of what he calls Play, or Pleasure, could one of these be the demure face on reptilian body? Is the figure of Time pulling back the curtain, or about to cover the unreckoning (but immortal?) incestuous lovers? Moreover X-rays suggest their contortions were still in the making as the canvas was painted –before she held the arrow, originally Venus’ right hand tousled the adolescent Cupid’s hair, to match his licentious grasp of her. As some moral allegory against the sin of love in time of syphilis, this all seems too enticingly frank to be wholly convincing, and the laurels that could otherwise celebrate the power of poetry seem wilfully hidden, mouths devoted to other pleasures. Neither love nor understanding comes easy in this extraordinary canvas, enamel-like in its elegance and polish. I’ve spent a long time in front of it at the National Gallery in London, and I don’t know what it means, either – perhaps that was part of the fun for its first viewers. But whatever is being said joins us to something subversive, the whole picture plane (as in Bronzino’s adjoining Madonna and Child) pushed forward, up close, as it were full frontal, the figures, anguished or jesting or lustful, thrust out into a playful, painful world of agony and love.
thebicyclops 