Mars and Venus

Around 1630 the pictures a painter in Rome most wanted to study were already more than 100 years old. Titian's great bacchanals, made for the Duke of Ferrara, hung in Cardinal Ludovisi's collection in the city, and younger artists copied them for their warmth and their loose, glowing colour. Poussin was one of those copyists, and the honeyed light and the soft landscape here come straight out of that habit. Mars has been disarmed while he gazes at Venus, and small cupids are making playthings of his helmet, his sword and his shield. Poussin was about 36, just out of an illness that nearly killed him and newly married to Anne-Marie Dughet, the daughter of the French cook who had nursed him through it. The Titians themselves left Rome in 1638, handed over to the King of Spain.