Venus

Venus reclines naked but for a translucent cloth across her hips on golden-yellow grass at the edge of a grove, a pearl at her ear and a jewelled necklace draped on the ground beside her, while beyond her a river winds under an arched bridge toward rocky cliffs, towns and indigo mountains under topaz clouds. Bernardino Luini, the Milanese master who carried Leonardo’s soft, smiling manner into the second quarter of the sixteenth century, painted the goddess about 1530 in the blended, tender light of the Leonardesque tradition, the small flowers in the grass and the pale clarity of her skin rendered with his characteristic sweetness. The panel, long in English collections, entered the National Gallery of Art in 1939 with the Samuel H. Kress Collection. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.