Venus and Cupid by Hans Baldung

During the first two decades of his work, Baldung did not resort to ancient subjects. One of the first ancient heroines was Venus in the film “Venus and Cupid.”

Venus Baldunga is distinguished by elongated proportions, her torso is whimsically broken, her shoulders are turned to the left, her head is to the right, her hands are tense, in which the goddess holds a dark green veil behind her back. The figure is emphatically voluminous and monumental, it stands on a kind of pedestal, like a statue, but the expression of her face, endowed with a lively, expressive look, turned somewhere beyond the picture, creates the impression of a “momentaryness” that contradicts “stature”.

In the person of Venus, endowed with very individual traits, the smile, irony, confidence and tranquility are subtly combined. Deprived of the traditional attributes of time for goddesses, such as a hairstyle or decorations on her chest, she appears beyond age and time as a true goddess and, at the same time, endowed with concreteness and individuality, previously not experienced.