Venus Crowned by Cupid

Titian painted Venus on a couch while a young man plays the lute at its far end, a picture known in two versions, in Cambridge and in New York. The Italian scholar Patrizia Tosini sees it as the closest model for this canvas. Here the musician has gone. Venus reclines on a red cloth, a white sheet across her hips, and Cupid stands behind her to set a wreath of flowers on her head. Two white doves, her birds, sit on a ledge at the left before a wooded landscape. The critic Roberto Longhi gave the picture to Cesari in 1928, and the museum keeps that attribution, although Tosini suspected the workshop's hand in the boy's face and the scenery. It can only be dated before 1607, when the painter's pictures were seized and passed to the pope's nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese.