Mars and Venus at the chess

Mars is the god of war and Venus the goddess of love, married to someone else, and here the Venetian painter known as Il Padovanino seats them across a chessboard instead of a battlefield. It is a joke about courtship as a game of strategy, the kind of clever mythological subject that decorated the palaces of 17th-century Venice, where Padovanino spent his career keeping the lush manner of Titian alive a generation after the older master's death. Chess had stood for the give and take of love for centuries, so the meaning would have been plain to the people who first hung this. The war god has laid his weapons aside and leans in over the board, outplayed by the naked goddess opposite, while Cupid hovers at her shoulder to watch how the match will go.