Venus verbindet Amor die Augen

Titian was an old man when he painted this, probably in his seventies and still working in Venice with a loose, smoky touch that dissolves edges into light. For a long time people were not even sure what it showed, and called it the Three Graces. The reading that stuck is a scene of love. Venus winds a band across the eyes of one Cupid while a second, close behind her, keeps his eyes open, and the scholar Erwin Panofsky took the pair as blind desire and clear-sighted love, the whole thing an allegory of marriage. Two nymphs bring a bow and a quiver of arrows. In 1608 a cardinal gave the painting to Scipione Borghese, and it has hung in his Roman villa ever since.