Venus vor dem Spiegel

Rubens painted this in Antwerp around 1614, not long after years in Italy studying Titian and Veronese. The composition is borrowed from them, a Venus seen from behind who shows her face only in the mirror a small cupid holds up for her. Contemporaries read that mirror as a sly claim for painting itself, a reflection that competes with nature to look as real as the flesh beside it. Rubens gives us both at once, the broad naked back in full light and the composed face in the glass, where she meets our eye as if aware we are watched. A second cupid raises a wreath of flowers over her loose blonde hair. He kept refining this Titian-derived type of the female nude for the rest of his career.