Amor

Cupid stands alone here, but he was not painted alone. Down the right edge of the panel runs a strip of pale skin, the shin of a much larger figure, and it belongs to his mother, Venus. The picture is a fragment of a Venus with Cupid, cut down at some point nobody can date, and the rest of the composition is lost. What survives is the boy, turned away from us with his bow and arrow, looking back over his shoulder. Cranach signed on the bow itself, with the small winged serpent he used as his mark. By 1663 the panel was recorded at Ambras, the castle above Innsbruck where the Habsburgs kept a famous chamber of art and curiosities, later brought to Vienna.