Venus and Amor

In 1524 the city where Hans Baldung worked, Strasbourg, was in the middle of turning Protestant, and across southern Germany peasants were rising in revolt. In the thick of that argument about faith, Baldung painted a naked goddess more than two metres tall. Venus stands on a panel of linden wood barely 84 centimetres wide, so her pale body fills almost the entire picture against a black ground. At her side is her son Amor, the small god of desire. He holds a flaming arrow, the sign of burning love, and he is blindfolded, perched on a ball. The blindfold carries the meaning: if the child could see, the old teaching ran, he would know that love of God outlasts the love between two people. So this is a sermon dressed as a nude, the most alluring body Baldung could paint, hung with a warning that the desire it stirs is the lesser thing. He made it just as the town around him was settling these very questions. The ball under Amor stands for truth, the one thing the blind boy sits on and cannot see.