Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid

The shape is the first thing to take in. The canvas is 85 centimetres high and nearly two metres wide, a long band, and the state catalogue takes it for decoration made for a bedchamber in a Venetian house around 1550. Mythology was the usual subject for that kind of work. Venus and Vulcan, the smith she was married to, are shown fussing over Cupid, who has his bow and his quiver of arrows with him. Secular painting of this sort is rare from Tintoretto, and the catalogue sets this canvas beside one of the same gods in Munich. Most scholars accept it as his, a few have given it to his assistants, and the dating has swung between his early and his mature years, with the Palatina catalogue of 2003 settling on the first half of the 1550s. In that inventory it is number three, and it hangs in the Sala di Venere.