Venus Adorned by the Graces

Venus Adorned by the Graces shows the goddess of love attended by her three handmaidens in a rich, festive palette of rose, gold and ivory, one of the most sumptuous of the small mythological panels Annibale Carracci painted in the 1590s. Annibale, together with his brother Agostino and cousin Lodovico, founded the Bolognese reform that renewed Italian painting after the artificiality of late Mannerism, grounding it in the study of nature and of antique and Renaissance art. Here the tender ceremony of ornament is set in a lush arcadian landscape, and the warm Venetian colour and soft modelling look ahead to the great Farnese Gallery ceiling he would finish within a decade.