Venus and Mars

Rubens painted this in the early 1630s, when he was in his fifties and much of Europe was being torn apart by the Thirty Years War. The two large figures, long called Venus and Mars, sit close together in the foreground, warm and richly painted in the manner Rubens had learned from Titian. Behind them the story turns darker. On the left the land is scorched and emptied, ruined by war, while a fury rushes in from the right out of the shadows. That contrast is the point. Some scholars now doubt the pair are really the gods of love and war at all, reading the picture instead as a warning against excess and intemperance. Rubens had strong ties to Genoa, and the painting has hung in the city for centuries.