Venus and Cupid

Venus and her son Cupid rest by a canopied bed in profile view, the doves of the goddess of love in the corner and the quiver with its unbuckled strap lying discarded — Cupid disarmed, his arrows set aside. Luca Cambiaso, the most inventive painter in sixteenth-century Genoa, made this picture about 1570 in the geometric simplification of anatomy and dramatic, silvery light that mark his personal manner. The canvas descended through the celebrated London collection of Sir Abraham Hume before the Art Institute acquired it in 1942 for the A. A. Munger Collection. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.