Venus

Abstract

Abstract Although Venus was the goddess of love, no one remembers her wedding to Vulcan, just the gossip that followed it. As Mercury said to Apollo in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, what was a stunning girl like Venus doing with a crippled blacksmith for a husband? He was probably all sweaty and covered in soot from the forge. It was easy to see his point. From the Farnesina onwards, the workshop of Vulcan was often depicted over fire places, and you could sense the heat and the smoke as you approached. Venus is not always there, partly because she did not appear in the ancient relief that influenced the school of Raphael, but also because almost the only time she went to see her husband was when she seduced him into manufacturing arms for Aeneas (her son by another man). The story is found in Virgil and the scene is popular in sixteenth century northern art, beginning with Maarten van Heemskerck’s painting of 1536. Vulcan’s team of Cyclopes were making Jupiter’s thunderbolts when they were interrupted by Venus’s order. But that was not all they produced. Cornelis van Haarlem’s Venus and Vulcanof 1590 displays the range of Vulcan’s output, and the protoindustrial scale of his operation (Fig. 65). It is a clever painting, composed to look like a fireplace. Inside the hearth the group with raised hammers is from a print after Heemskerck – the motif relegated to the back of the shop like any superseded design.