Touch

The subject is touch, and the room chosen for it is an armoury. Venus and Cupid handle breastplates and helmets forged for Mars, and behind them Vulcan's smiths pour metal into cannon. The panel was painted in 1618, nine years into the truce that had stopped the fighting between the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, with three years still to run, so all this armour was for the moment armour nobody needed. It reached Spain through the collection of Wolfgang Wilhelm, count palatine of Neuburg, and belonged to Felipe IV by the 1630s. It hung in the royal Alcázar in Madrid by 1636 and came through the fire that gutted that palace at Christmas 1734.