Venus Blindfolding Cupid, c. 1566/1570 or c. 1576/1580

The composition corresponds closely to the left side of Titian’s Venus Blindfolding Cupid in the Galleria Borghese, Rome [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Titian, Venus Blindfolding Cupid, c. 1565, oil on canvas, Galleria Borghese, Rome. Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY, universally regarded as an autograph masterpiece and usually dated to circa 1565. Apart from the obvious differences of costume, with the figure of Venus in the present work wearing a costume and jewelry more closely related to contemporary fashion, the main iconographical difference is that the blindfolded Cupid here holds one of his arrows across his mother’s lap. But there are good reasons to suppose that the format of the Gallery’s picture, which is cut at the right, likewise originally consisted of a broad rectangle and included two more figures in the lost section, in addition to the fragmentary third figure, whose disembodied arm holding up a silver dish survived the mutilation of the painting. Mid-18th-century inventories describe the picture as representing “the Elements (or the Graces) offering Tribute” to Venus, implying that a total of three figures are now missing,[1]  [1]
For the “Elements,” see Provenance, note 1; the Stowe inventories up to 1780 (see Provenance, note 3) describe the picture as “Venus binding the eyes of Cupid, and the Graces offering a Tribute.” By the time of the 1797 inventory, the picture is described rather as “Titian’s mistress (as Venus),” implying that the mutilation took place between these dates. As suggested by Colin Anson (see Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings [Washington, DC, 1979], 1:504, 505–506 n. 4, and correspondence in NGA curatorial files), the picture was probably cut to make room for newly acquired pictures on the same wall. In the 1740 sale of Jervas’s pictures (see Provenance, note 1), the dimensions are given as 5 feet 7 inches by 6 feet 6 inches. Since this height is clearly much greater than that of the Gallery’s picture, it must be that the recorded dimensions include a frame of c. 19 inches (48.3 cm) wide. In that case, the original dimensions of the picture (c. 118.5 cm × c. 175.3 cm) would have been close to those of the Borghese picture (118 cm × 185 cm). and the x-radiograph of the Borghese picture has revealed that it, too, was originally intended to have a third figure, between the Venus group on the left and the nymphs on the right.[2]  [2]
See Paolo Spezzani, in Tiziano: Amor sacro e amor profano, ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini (Milan, 1995), 441. The pose of this figure, subsequently canceled by the artist in the Borghese version, corresponds closely to that of the fragmentary figure in the Gallery’s picture.

When at Stowe the painting was considered to be an autograph Titian, and soon after its arrival in America, this traditional attribution was upheld by Wilhelm Suida,[3]  [3]
Wilhelm Suida, “Miscellanea Tizianesca,” Arte veneta 6 (1952): 36–38. who argued furthermore that the work preceded the Borghese version by a decade. Rodolfo Pallucchini likewise regarded the present picture as autograph and datable to the mid-1550s.[4]  [4]
Rodolfo Pallucchini, Tiziano: Lezioni di storia dell’arte (Bologna, 1954), 2:113–115; Rodolfo Pallucchini, Tiziano (Florence, 1969), 1:169–170, 180, 310; Rodolfo Pallucchini, Profilo di Tiziano (Florence, 1977), 55. The x-radiograph of the Borghese version, which reveals the cancellation of a figure still present in the Gallery’s version, might appear to support this opinion. But as first indicated by Paola Della Pergola in 1955, with the subsequent concurrence of a majority of critics (including Francesco Valcanover, Fern Rusk Shapley, and Harold Wethey),[5]  [5]
Paola Della Pergola, Galleria Borghese: I dipinti (Rome, 1955), 1:132; Francesco Valcanover, Tutta la pittura di Tiziano (Milan, 1960), 2:71; Francesco Valcanover, L’opera completa di Tiziano (Milan, 1969), no. 410; Francesco Valcanover, in Le siècle de Titien: L’Âge d’Or de la peinture à Venise (Paris, 1993), 619; Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI Century (London, 1968), 188–189; Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings (Washington, DC, 1979), 1:503–506; Harold Wethey, The Paintings of Titian (London, 1975), 3:85–86, 207–208. the style and technique of the Gallery’s picture indicate rather that it postdates the qualitatively superior Borghese version and was executed by a shop assistant or follower. The anonymous compiler of the 1961 catalog of paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago suggested that the picture was by the same hand as the Chicago Allegory (no. 1943.90; now Allegory of Venus and Cupid), which was at that time attributed to Titian’s pupil Damiano Mazza.[6]  [6]
Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection (Chicago, 1961), 307. Although sharing some compositional motifs, however, the two pictures are not particularly close stylistically; and in any case, too little is known of Mazza’s independent style for either of the two to be attributed to him with any conviction.[7]  [7]
For Mazza, see M. Roy Fisher, Titian’s Assistants during the Later Years, PhD diss., Harvard University, 1958 (New York, 1977), 138–139; Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, “La ‘bottega’ di Tiziano: Sistema solare e buco nero,” Studi Tizianeschi 4 (2006): 79–80. Definitely unconvincing is the attribution of the Gallery’s picture by Federico Zeri to Lambert Sustris, whose personal style, despite the mystery that still surrounds his later career,[8]  [8]
Federico Zeri, “Review of Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools XV–XVI Century by Fern Rusk Shapley,” The Burlington Magazine 111 (1969): 456. For the late Sustris, see Robert Echols, “Tintoretto, Christ at the Sea of Galilee, and the Unknown Later Career of Lambert Sustris,” Venezia Cinquecento 6, no. 12 (1996): 93–149. remains relatively recognizable, with its fluid handling of paint and pale color schemes. To some extent, as implied by Wethey, the bright, variegated colors and the luxurious accessories are closer to Veronese than the late Titian, whose preference for a duskier, more monochrome palette is more faithfully represented by the Gallery’s version of Venus and Adonis. The evidence of the x-radiographs of the Borghese picture indicate, nonetheless, that the executant of the present work must have been a member of Titian’s studio, since he clearly had direct access to the master’s designs. Yet the x-radiographs of the present picture [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] X-radiograph, Workshop or Follower of Titian, Venus Blindfolding Cupid, c. 1566/1570 or c. 1576/1580, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection reveal that the executant made a number of less radical changes of his own, changing, for example, the position of Venus’s left forearm, as well as a number of details of her costume, and incorporating a jeweled chain very similar to that in the Salome of circa 1560–1570 (Koelliker collection, Milan). It remains difficult to decide whether the work was painted simultaneously with the Borghese version; immediately after it, but still directly under Titian’s supervision; or after his death and in imitation of his unfinished late works, circa 1576–1580.[9]  [9]
Giorgio Tagliaferro, in Le botteghe di Tiziano (Florence, 2009), 239, favors the first interpretation; Nicholas Penny (letter to Peter Humfrey of Nov. 17, 2001, on file) inclines toward the last.

As pointed out by Robert Wald, a close reflection of the original composition of the Gallery’s picture is probably provided by a low-quality, perhaps 18th-century painting in the stores of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] After Titian, Venus Blindfolding Cupid, possibly 18th century, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband.[10]  [10]
Robert Wald, “Titian’s Vienna Danaë: Observations on Execution and Replication in Titian’s Studio,” in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Venice, 2008), 133 n. 48. Although Venus is dressed differently in the latter, the owner of the arm upraising the dish is present; and apart from the change of the sex of the figure on the far right, the figures in the Vienna picture correspond well to the “Graces offering Tribute to Venus” recorded in Stowe inventories of the 18th century.[11]  [11]
See Entry, note 1, and Provenance, note 1. Thus, all three figures in the Vienna picture seem to bear attributes of the goddess of love: the foremost female holds apples in the folds of her skirt, the figure at the right holds up a dove in a basket, and the silver dish held up by the figure at the center perhaps contains flowers. On this evidence it may be that the Vienna picture represents a more or less literal copy of a lost autograph painting by Titian, which preceded the Borghese picture, and which provided the basis for the Gallery’s variant.[12]  [12]
The existence of a lost autograph prototype was already hypothesized by Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven and London, 1997), 144; and Miguel Falomir, in Tiziano, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2003), 265, 402. All three of the figures included in the now-missing section of the Gallery’s picture then reappear, together or individually, in numerous variants painted by Titian and his workshop during the 1550s and 1560s.[13]  [13]
The female figure, seen in three-quarter view from the back, turning her head to face the spectator and raising a silver dish above her head, corresponds, for example, to the Salome of c. 1555 (Prado, Madrid); the figure also holding up a container, and with its face seen in sharp foreshortening, reappears in the Vienna version of the Danaë (Kunsthistorisches Museum) and elsewhere. The evolution of Titian’s composition, from the so-called Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos of c. 1531–1532 (Louvre, Paris) to the Borghese Venus Blindfolding Cupid, is analyzed through their many variants by Kristina Herrmann Fiore, “L’‘Allegoria coniugale’ di Tiziano del Louvre e le derivazioni, connesse con ‘Venere che benda Amore,’” in Tiziano: Amor sacro e amor profano, ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini (Milan, 1995), 411–420; and Jaynie Anderson, in Tiziano: Amor sacro e amor profano, 435–436.

The partly contemporary and courtly character of the costume, together with the more worldly, less classicizing character of her features compared with those of the Borghese picture, led Suida to suppose that the figure was intended as a portrait. In keeping with this supposition, the picture is still entitled Portrait of a Young Lady as Venus Binding the Eyes of Cupid in Shapley’s catalog of 1979.[14]  [14]
Wilhelm Suida, “Miscellanea Tizianesca,” Arte veneta 6 (1952): 36–38; Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings (Washington, DC, 1979), 1:503. But the features are still highly idealized and the costume is fanciful, and there is every reason to suppose that like the Borghese version, the Gallery’s picture is intended as a mythological allegory. Despite the plausible assumption that it once represented the Three Graces bringing gifts to Venus, the precise significance of the allegory—like that of the Borghese picture, in which the Graces are replaced by two nymphs with the attributes of huntresses—remains unclear. The two most detailed interpretations of the Borghese picture, both in a moralizing, neoplatonic vein but with differing results, have been provided by Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind.[15]  [15]
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), 165–169; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958), 76–77; Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (London, 1969), 129–136. These and other interpretations of the Borghese picture have been surveyed by Kristina Herrmann Fiore in Titian, Prince of Painters (Venice, 1990), 343, 346; and most recently by Andrea Bayer, in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrea Bayer (New Haven and London, 2008), 330–332. Panofsky pointed out that the two cupids represent Eros and Anteros, both sons of Venus, but symbols of contrasting aspects of love, the blind and sensuous, and the clear-sighted and virtuous. According to Panofsky, the work should be seen as a marriage picture, in which Venus is shown choosing between the two, opting for virtuous and reciprocal love, and about to remove Eros’s blindfold. Wind emphasized rather the need of the goddess of love to combine perspicacity and passion, and by deliberately sending Eros out into the world blindfolded, the virtuous love advocated by his brother can attain a higher joy. The interpretation of the picture as a Domestication of Cupid by Walter Friedländer is closer to that of Panofsky than of Wind, but the author identified the main figure not as Venus but as Vesta, goddess of the hearth and domestic chastity, who is concerned to protect the world from the harm caused by Eros.[16]  [16]
Walter Friedländer, “The Domestication of Cupid,” in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art Presented to Anthony Blunt (London, 1967), 51–52. Rona Goffen, who unaccountably identified the blindfolded cupid as Anteros and his standing brother as Eros, suggested that the meaning is deliberately ambiguous, evoking the teasing uncertainties of love.[17]  [17]
Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven and London, 1997), 144. More recent scholars have tended to side with Panofsky in interpreting Venus in this context as a tutelary deity of marital love and conjugal chastity;[18]  [18]
See, for example, Kristina Herrmann Fiore, “Venere che benda Amore,” in Tiziano: Amor sacro e amor profano, ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini (Milan, 1995), 389–409; Miguel Falomir, in Tiziano, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2003), 264–265, 401–402; Andrea Bayer, in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrea Bayer (New Haven and London, 2008), 330–332. and in this case, the Gallery’s picture may be assumed similarly to have been painted (or at least, acquired) to celebrate a marriage. As noted by Miguel Falomir,[19]  [19]
Miguel Falomir, in Tiziano, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2003), 265, 402, developing a suggestion by Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven and London, 1997), 144. however, the arrow here gives the message an ironic twist and reminds its viewers that the blind passion of Eros represents an ongoing threat to marital bliss.

Peter Humfrey

March 21, 2019