Palma Giovane, 'Mars and Venus', about 1590

Venus, goddess of love and beauty, twists to embrace her lover, Mars, god of war, who has thrown off his armour in his haste to reach her bed. Venus is above and on top of Mars, taking his head in her arm. Mars tumbles onto the bed as he meets her lips in the urgency of their desire.

A pair of doves, an attribute of Venus, are beside winged Cupid, who struggles to untie the laces of Mars‘ footwear. Venus is married to Vulcan. The voluminous red bed drapes are looped back around the bedposts to reveal this scene of adultery like a stage set. The earthiness of the deities’ forbidden passion is echoed and expressed in the painting’s sultry colour palette. The haste of the brushwork, without much detail, suggests that this painting was never intended to be displayed where it would be closely inspected – perhaps high up, or in a bedroom over a door.

The erotic directness of the picture as well as its bawdy comedy are captured in a description of the painting from 1652 as ‘A Venus whole body on a bed & Mars a fat red colord knave wch she pulls down & a cupid pulls off his buskins’. Palma’s picture retains none of the elegance or poetic beauty of Titian’s Venus and Adonis (Prado, Madrid) from which Venus' pose derives, but has its own direct, voluptuous appeal.

This painting is close in size, character, and connected in subject to Palma Giovane’s Venus and Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan of about 1590 (Staatliche Museen, Kassel), which shows Venus from the front kissing Cupid, while Vulcan works in his forge in the background. There is a larger painting of Venus and Mars by Palma dated MDC (1600) in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. In 1619, the Italian poet Marino asked Palma to paint a picture of Mars leaving his armour in the care of a nymph as he turns to Venus, who waits for him, naked on her bed. He had given a large canvas of this subject to one of the Doria family and now wanted a smaller version on copper. The National Gallery’s painting may be a little too early in date to have been the one given away by Marino, although the description seems to match.

What may be a preparatory study for the National Gallery’s painting or for another painting of Mars and Venus is in the British Museum’s album of Palma Giovane’s drawings. It is mounted on the same page as the preparatory drawing for the painting in Kassel, suggesting that Palma may have come up with the idea for both of them at the same time.

When Mars and Venus was presented to the National Gallery in 1838 its owner, Hugh Percy, the 3rd Duke of Northumberland, stated that it was not suitable for public exhibition, and so it hung for many years in the Director’s office.