Venus und Mars

Botticelli painted this long, low panel around 1485, and its shape is a clue to what it was for. It was almost certainly set into a piece of furniture or panelling in a Florentine house, perhaps a marriage bed or a chest, which is why it is so much wider than it is tall. Mars, the god of war, has fallen dead asleep after love, and Venus watches him, wide awake and composed. The idea, popular with the humanist scholars around the Medici at the time, is that love disarms war. The little creatures playing around the sleeping god are satyrs, and one has climbed inside his discarded armour while another blows a conch shell right by his ear without waking him. In the greenery at the lower right Botticelli painted a cluster of wasps, whose Italian name puns on the Vespucci family, thought to be connected to the commission.