Vênus e Cupido

Holbein painted this Venus in Basel in the mid-1520s, just as the Reformation was closing the door on his best work. The city was turning Protestant, and reformers had little use for painted altarpieces and saints, so the commissions Holbein had trained for were drying up. He turned instead to portraits and to mythological subjects like this one, a Venus offering herself with one open hand held out toward the viewer. He worked economically: the outline of her figure was traced from an earlier painting of the courtesan Lais and transferred in reverse onto this panel. Within a couple of years the shortage of work in Basel would push him across the Channel to England, where the Tudor court kept him busy for the rest of his life.