비너스, 큐피드, 우매함과 시간

Bronzino painted this cold, polished puzzle in Florence around 1545, and it was almost certainly meant as a gift from the Medici duke to the king of France. On the surface it is a game of love. Venus and her son Cupid embrace, a laughing child at the right scatters rose petals, and pale masks lie on the floor. But the figures around them turn the mood. At the top a bald, muscular old man with an hourglass on his back is Time, drawing a curtain aside, and along the edges the sweetness curdles. In the shadows at the left an old woman claws at her own hair in grief. Behind Cupid a girl with a sweet face turns out to have the body of a monster, offering honey in one hand and a sting in the other. Some scholars read that ravaged figure on the left as a body wrecked by syphilis, the new disease sweeping Europe just then, so that the whole scene becomes a warning hidden inside a luxury object, the pleasure and the price shown together. The disease was called the French sickness at the time, which may be why the message was wrapped so carefully for a French king. It has been in London since 1860.