The Toilet of Venus

In 1621 Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, ordered four large canvases from Albani for the Villa Favorita, the pleasure house he was building just outside his city. The subject was the loves of Venus and Diana, which Albani had painted a few years earlier as four round pictures for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome. For Mantua he took the same compositions and spread them across canvases about two and a half metres wide.

The work dragged on. The duke died in 1626, imperial troops sacked Mantua in 1630, and the Louvre gives 1633 as the year the set was finished.

In this canvas Venus sits on a terrace in front of a palace by a lake, while the Graces dress her and cupids bring jewels and hold up a mirror. Above, in the clouds, other cupids are already harnessing swans to her chariot.