Venus and Mars (or Mars and Venus) is a panel painting of about 1485 by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. It shows the Roman gods Venus, goddess of love, and Mars, god of war, in an allegory of beauty and valour. The youthful and voluptuous couple recline in a forest setting, surrounded by playful baby satyrs.
The painting was probably intended to commemorate a wedding, set into panelling or a piece of furniture to adorn the bedroom of the bride and groom, possibly as part of a set of works. This is suggested by the wide format and the close view of the figures. It is widely seen as representation of an ideal view of sensuous love. It seems likely that Botticelli worked out the concept for the painting, with its learned allusions, with an advisor such as Poliziano, the Medici house poet and Renaissance Humanist scholar.
The exact date of Venus and Mars is not known, but the National Gallery's dated the painting to "" in 2017. Scholar Ronald Lightbown dates it to "probably around 1483", while art historians Leopold and Helen Ettlinger date the painting to "the latter half of the 1480s". All dates depend on analysis of the style, as the painting has not been convincingly tied to a specific date or event, such as a wedding. It likely comes a few years after the Primavera and Pallas and the Centaur (both about 1482) and around the time of The Birth of Venus (). It is the only one of these paintings not in the Uffizi in Florence; it has been in the National Gallery in London since 1874.
Description
Venus watches Mars sleep while two infant satyrs play, carrying his helmet (a sallet) and lance as another rests inside his breastplate under his arm. A fourth blows a small conch shell in his ear in an effort, so far unsuccessful, to wake him. The clear implication is that the couple have been making love; the male habit of falling asleep after sex was a regular subject for ribald jokes in the context of weddings in Renaissance Italy. The lance and conch can be read as sexual symbols.
The scene is set in a grove of myrtle, traditionally associated with Venus and marriage, or possibly laurel, associated with Lorenzo de' Medici (il Magnifico), or perhaps both plants. There is a limited view of the meadow beyond, leading to a distant walled city.
In the foreground, a swarm of wasps hovers around Mars' head, possibly as a symbol that love is often accompanied by pain. Another explanation, first suggested by Ernst Gombrich, is that the wasps represent the Vespucci family that may have commissioned the painting. They had been neighbours of Botticelli since his childhood, and had commissioned his Saint Augustine in His Study for the Ognissanti church in 1480, probably in addition to other commissions. Their coat of arms included wasps, as their name means "little wasps" in Italian, and the wasps' nest, in a hollow in the tree in the top right corner, is exactly in the place in the panel where the coat of arms of a patron was often painted.
The painting is thought originally to have been set into panelling as a spalliera, or part of furniture such as a bed, the back of a lettuccio, a wooden sofa, or a similar piece.
Ronald Lightbown describes Mars as "Botticelli's most perfect male nude", though there are not really a large number of these; he was less interested in perfecting the anatomy of his figures than many of his Florentine contemporaries, but seems to have paid special attention to it here. The Venus here, unlike in the artist's Birth of Venus, is fully clothed, as she is in marital mode. This despite Venus being the wife of Vulcan, making the relationship adulterous by normal human standards. In Greek Neoplatonism, Harmony was the daughter of their union. Other late classical sources regarded Cupid as a child of the union.
Interpretation
The usual view of scholars is that the painting was commissioned to celebrate a marriage, and is a relatively uncomplicated representation of sensual pleasure, with an added meaning of love conquering or outlasting war. This was a commonplace in Renaissance thinking, which might be elaborated in terms of Renaissance Neoplatonism. As with the other mythologies, Ernst Gombrich and Edgar Wind were the first to analyse the painting in these terms. The couple's relationship could also be considered in terms of astrology, in which Mars is, according to Marsilio Ficino, "outstanding in strength among the planets, because he makes men stronger, but Venus masters him ...she seems to master Mars, but Mars never masters Venus".