Venere allo specchio

This is the only surviving female nude by Velázquez, and in Spain that was a dangerous thing to paint. The Inquisition actively policed nudes in 17th-century Spain, so a Venus like this one, made around 1647 to 1651, was a rare and quiet transgression. Its most violent chapter came much later. On a March morning in 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery in London, drew a meat cleaver from her coat and slashed the canvas seven times across the back of the reclining Venus. She said she did it in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette leader, the day before. The restorer stitched the wounds so well that in the finished surface you have to be told where they were, though on the mirror the goddess holds, her reflected face is left deliberately soft and blurred.