Guido Reni and Studio, 'The Toilet of Venus', about 1620-5

In this monumental painting, Venus, the goddess of love, is attended by the Three Graces, who carefully fasten her sandals and jewellery. Her son Cupid stands before his bow and arrow in the foreground, delicately holding a pearl earring between forefinger and thumb. A putto reaches through the window, which is framed by architectural mouldings, to place a flower amongst an arrangement in an antique urn.

Several of these features appear in other paintings by Guido Reni created during the same period, including Venus and Cupid (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio) and Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). The semi-reclining goddess is shown with lips parted and eyes looking heavenward – an expression that came to be associated with both religious and secular women in Reni’s paintings.

The composition is filled with luxurious fabrics. A crisp silk curtain fringed with gold frames the right-hand corner of the painting, while swathes of blue and pink drapery bunch up around Venus‘ elbow and surround her body. The artist’s skill in painting drapery was well recognised and subjects like this one gave him the opportunity to showcase his talents. The seventeenth-century biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori wrote that, ’Guido knew how to regulate draperies in a noble manner, with ample folds and with elegance ... and as in all the other parts of painting, he had facility in handling outlines and movements.'

Multiple versions of this composition are known, and this painting was previously considered a copy carried out by Reni’s studio assistants. Recent conservation treatment has, however, revealed far more of Reni’s hand at work than had previously been thought. It was common for Reni (and for other seventeenth-century masters) to allocate work to members of his studio which he would later retouch to his satisfaction.

Several pentimenti – or revisions made to the painting’s design during its execution – are here visible to the naked eye, around the robes and hands of the central Grace, and on the piece of pink drapery around Venus’s midriff. More substantial changes have been revealed through infrared reflectography, such as the late addition of the putto in the window. These changes may imply that the composition was being reworked by Reni and his studio over time. They support the argument that this is the original composition on which other versions are based, and that it is the work painted for Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, and delivered to him around 1623.