Venus Disarming Cupid

The story here comes from Ovid. Venus reaches to take the quiver from her son Cupid, hoping to stop him loosing any more arrows, but she is already too late. One has grazed her, and she will fall helplessly for the mortal hunter Adonis, who is fated to die young. Paolo Veronese painted this around 1550, a young man newly arrived from the mainland town of Verona, before Venice made him one of its grand decorators of ceilings and banquet scenes. He built the pose from a drawing by an earlier master he admired, Parmigianino. The picture passed through European collections for centuries and only reached Worcester, in Massachusetts, in 2013, the gift of a New York collector.