Das Venusfest

Rubens painted this crowded scene of Venus's festival around 1635, when he was in his late fifties and the most celebrated painter in Europe. It grows directly out of an obsession he never shed. Decades earlier, in Spain and Italy, he had studied Titian closely, and he made his own copy of Titian's Worship of Venus, keeping it in his house until he died. This canvas is his answer to that older picture, packed with cupids swarming a statue of Venus while nymphs and satyrs dance around her. The subject came, at several removes, from an ancient Greek description of a lost painting. Rubens turns that literary memory into warm moving flesh, and the whole surface seems to spin around the pale stone figure of the goddess at its heart.