Love and Charity (formerly called Terrestrial Venus with Eros and Celestial Venus with Anteros)

This round panel was painted to mark a birth. In Tuscany a new mother might be given a painted tray, a desco da parto, and these trays were often kept afterwards as a souvenir of the event. Their subjects usually have to do with love and fertility, and that is where the trouble begins with this one, because nobody is quite sure what it shows.

For a long time the undressed woman on the left was read as the Heavenly Venus with Anteros, set against an Earthly Venus standing with Eros, whose weapons hang from the tree. Other scholars see the seated woman as Charity, keeping company with Love, and that is the title the Louvre uses today. The museum dates the panel only broadly, to the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. It may once have been in the Chigi Zondadari palace in Siena, Sodoma's adopted city, and it came to the Louvre in 1914 as a bequest from Baron Basile de Schlichting.