Venus and Cupid

The design behind this painting was one of the most copied inventions of the Italian Renaissance. Around 1533 a Florentine named Bartolomeo Bettini asked Michelangelo for a drawing of a nude Venus kissed by her son Cupid, to hang in his home. Michelangelo supplied a full-scale cartoon, and the painter Pontormo turned it into color. The image was an immediate sensation, and over the following decades at least 32 painted versions and replicas were made, in workshops across Florence and beyond. This is one of them. The museum has long given it to Agnolo Bronzino, the polished court painter of the Medici and Pontormo's own pupil, who returned to this composition more than once. That attribution is contested. Bronzino, his teacher Pontormo, and a crowd of followers all worked from the same Michelangelo source, and telling one careful hand from another across so many close copies is exactly the kind of question specialists still argue over. Who held the brush here is unsettled, but the ancestry of the picture is not, and it runs straight back to a lost drawing by Michelangelo.