The Worship of Venus

Titian delivered this to Ferrara in 1519 for Alfonso d'Este, the duke building a private room he filled with pictures of the ancient world. The duke had originally commissioned the subject from an older painter who died before finishing it, so it passed to the young Titian, who worked from a description in an ancient Greek text and tried to bring a lost antique painting back to life. Almost the whole foreground swarms with small winged children, dozens of them, climbing trees, gathering apples, flying, tussling and pulling each other's hair, all under a statue of Venus. It was Titian's first attempt to reconstruct a picture from antiquity.