Sleeping Venus with Cupid

When Poussin painted this around 1630, he had been in Rome only a few years, and he was studying the Venetian painters hard, above all Titian, whose warm mythologies he could see in Roman collections. You can feel that here. The goddess sleeps under the trees, flushed and heavy with sunlight, her son Cupid at her feet with his little bow, a second child clutching a bundle of arrows. It is a softer, more sensual Poussin than the cool, measured classicist he would become a decade later. Look past Venus into the shade and the scene turns knowing: two men lean out from behind a tree to watch her, and a pair of lovers drifts through the middle distance. The picture has hung in Dresden for centuries, one of the Venetian-flavoured works that came out of Poussin's early Roman years.