Venus and Cupid with Two Satyrs in a Landscape

Almost everything Simone Peterzano painted was for a church. He worked in Milan in the years when its archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, was policing religious art hard, and Peterzano turned out sober altarpieces and chapel frescoes to order. This is the other kind of picture, made around 1570 for a private room: Venus asleep in a wide green landscape, Cupid at his arrows, and two satyrs crowding in from the right, one lifting her drapery, the other setting pomegranates down by her feet. The Venetian training he advertised, signing himself a pupil of Titian, is all over it. The canvas was unknown until 1989, when it surfaced in a French private collection and Mina Gregori recognised his hand; it was shown in New York, and the Italian state bought it for Brera. Fourteen years after it was painted, Peterzano signed the apprenticeship contract of a boy from Caravaggio named Michelangelo Merisi.