Venus and Cupid

Around 1533 a Florentine banker named Bartolomeo Bettini set out to decorate his bedroom with an ideal of love, and he had the connections to do it grandly. His friend Michelangelo drew the design, a full-size cartoon of Venus turning to kiss her son Cupid, and the painter Pontormo transferred it to panel and coloured it. Michelangelo left for Rome the next year and never really settled in Florence again, so this is one of the last things his Florentine circle made together. You can see his hand in the sculptural muscle and the impossible twist of the body, more carved than painted. The image caught on at once. Over the following decades painters made more than 30 copies and variants of it, so that Bettini's private bedroom picture became one of the most repeated nudes of the century.