In his 1568 Life of the Florentine painter Jacopo Pontormo, Giorgio Vasari describes how Michelangelo executed a full-size drawing or cartoon for his patron Bartolomeo Bettini, a merchant-banker, which showed:

a nude Venus with a Cupid who is kissing her, in order that he might have it executed in painting by Pontormo and place it in the center of a “chamber” of his own, in the lunettes of which he had begun to have painted by Bronzino figures of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, with the intention of having there all the other poets who have sung of love in Tuscan prose and verse. (14)

Soon after Pontormo completed the Venus and Cupid (about 1533), Alessandro de’ Medici, the duke of Florence, confiscated the painting and offered Michelangelo’s cartoon (since lost) to Bettini as a conciliatory gesture. Now in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, this extraordinary and immensely popular mythological painting was the focus of the exhibition Venere e Amore: Michelangelo e la nuova bellezza ideale / Venus and Love: Michelangelo and the New Ideal of Beauty, complete with accompanying catalogue—the subject of the present review—published in facing columns of Italian and English. The catalogue contains five essays (which will receive the most attention here) that discuss the painting’s original context, style, and meaning. Together with entries on other works displayed in the exhibition, the volume includes a series of appendices on the critical fortunes of the Venus and Cupid, its copies, and its recent restoration.

Measuring an impressive 128.5 X 193 cm, the painting shows a powerful, reclining Venus and an equally corporeal Cupid, who twists and entwines himself around the goddess in order to caress and kiss her. The recent removal of layers of discolored varnish and the anachronistic drapery covering Venus’s genitalia allows us to study this captivating image afresh (see app. 5). Considering the myriad copies and variations of the composition, Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini argue convincingly in their essay (109–21) that Michelangelo’s cartoon was itself reproduced in Pontormo’s workshop, both in its entirety and in smaller, separate segments. While the choice of the painting as the focus of an exhibition is highly appropriate, not all readers may share Jonathan Katz Nelson’s assessment that “two major painters collaborat[ing] on a single work jars with our sensibilities” (27), or that the portrayal of Venus’s physique and the consummate artificiality of the work “constitutes a second obstacle to our appreciation of the work today” (28).

Richard Aste’s essay “Bartolomeo Bettini and his Florentine ‘chamber’ Decoration” (2–25) addresses questions regarding Bettini’s patronage, his rank in mercantile society, and, above all, his fidelity to the Republican cause against Medici hegemony. The patron, here described as a “relatively minor figure” (12) who was upwardly mobile, was exiled from Florence by 1537 because of his political views. Unfortunately, no documents have come to light that would identify Bettini’s urban residence at the time of the commission. In addition to the Venus and Cupid, the only other recognizable object from the camera is Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of Dante, known through copies, with the original tentatively identified as the canvas housed in a private collection in Florence (cat. no. 22). On the whole, Aste’s essay is well researched but tends to shift rapidly between public and private considerations. He characterizes Bettini’s camera as a Republican commission, an ambitious “demonstration piece” (15) designed to impress the patron’s peers and to manifest his virtue. Considering the highly erotic character of the Venus and Cupid, it is difficult to see the work primarily in terms of the virtues of conspicuous consumption. The author’s suggestion that the Accademia painting was created to assure the patron’s hopes for marriage and a prosperous family also finds cause for reservation. We have no knowledge that Bettini ever married, nor was the painting of Venus and Cupid ever meant to be experienced in isolation from the portraits depicting vernacular poets—a peculiar incentive to marital union and fertility.

Certainly Bettini’s camera was multivalent, but there is a tendency to overlook issues concerned with nonmaterial values that speak more to the nature of his imagination and this pictorial decoration as an imaginative construct. At stake for the merchant and banking classes of Florence was not so much the urgency to transcend their station (in fact, social mobility among the aristocracy was rendered stagnant by the creation of a ducal state), but rather to redefine their cultural and communal identity as they pursued informal and intimate investigations into classical and vernacular modes of expression.

Bettini was closely involved with the promotion of the vernacular in Florentine society. Roberto Leporatti’s contribution, “Venus, Cupid and the Poets of Love” (64–89), relates that Bettini features as a protagonist in Baccio Tasio’s Il Vespro, an unpublished dialogue that discusses the structure of the vernacular with regard to an obscure comedy entitled Il Negromante (apparently not Ludovico Ariosto’s), supposedly performed in Bettini’s residence. Moreover, it was to Bettini that its publisher dedicated Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni (1549), a treatise devoted, in part, to considering the relative merits of painting and sculpture in relation to poetry’s expressive powers concerning the theme of love. Whereas the reader might expect to learn more about Bettini’s patronage in relation to the literary and art-historical importance of these two pieces, Leporatti is more concerned with Neoplatonic and moralizing tendencies among the Florentine literati. “The idea of representing Venus and Cupid,” in Leopratti’s view, “rests on these premises: the former, the symbol of contemplative love detached from all earthly passion; the latter, tending with his whole being towards the fulfillment of material pleasure” (80).

Such moralized interpretations govern other essays and entries. For instance, Nelson’s “The Florentine Female Venus and Cupid: a Heroic Female Nude and the Power of Love” (26–63) suggests that the painting is allegorical in design and shows the twofold nature of love: celestial versus earthly. We read that Venus’s masculine features and her “noble bearing” are emblematic of virtue, whereas Cupid’s “agitated” gestures are a sign of vice.

Leatrice Mendelsohn’s essay, “ ‘How to Depict Eros’: Greek Origins of the Malevolent Eros in Cinquecento Painting” (90–108), also embraces a spiritual or Christian allegorical reading. She writes, “The male spectator’s seduction by a sculptural, reclining Venus represents the first phase of his assimilation to God.… Through the suffering caused by Love, the spectator-lover achieves salvation” (104). Mendelsohn focuses on emblems of Eros (specifically, the false etymology of Anteros as virtuous love, contrary to Eros) and Moschus’s idyll Runaway Cupid, a text from the Greek Anthology. And even though she cites a highly profane, long and intense kiss between Venus and Cupid described in Apuleius’s Golden Ass (4.31), she still defines the kiss exchanged by Venus and Cupid as “chaste.”

But the noble type of love, according to Mario Equicola’s highly important Libro de natura de amore (1525), is the union between Cupid and Psyche, whereas libidinous love is represented by Cupid and Venus. The catalogue does not give sufficient allowance to Michael Levey’s claim that “the erotic power of Venus was more relevant” to the Accademia painting, especially considering that “the trio of poets were probably present as witnesses to the power of beauty and the force of love” (“Sacred and Profane Significance in Two Paintings by Bronzino,” in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art presented to Anthony Blunt on his 60th Birthday [London: Phaidon, 1967], 30–33, at 32). A moralized reading also contradicts Varchi’s response to the visual force of the imagery in his Due Lezzioni. He invokes the story of the Cnidian Venus sculpted by Praxiteles, an ancient work whose beauty provoked young men to fall in love and masturbate: “yet the same thing happens today all the time with the Venus that Michelangelo drew for Sir Bartolomeo Bettini, colored by the hand of Sir Jacopo Pontormo” (231) [translation mine]. Equicola himself speaks of a similar seductive artifice exhibited by Praxiteles’ marble Sleeping Cupid, owned by Isabella d’Este of Mantua and paired next to Michelangelo’s own marble Sleeping Cupid, a work sculpted in the artist’s youth (now lost).

More importantly, there is a powerfully erotic aspect to the ekphrastic diction in the vernacular prose and verse of Boccaccio. In his allegorical poem Amorosa visione, Boccaccio describes the experience of a series of wall paintings (istorie) illustrating various amorous subjects. Canto 15 opens with an extended description of the beautiful, adolescent god of love that informs the Michelangelo-Pontormo Cupid. In Canto 19 of the same text, Boccaccio also describes a scene of Mars and Venus disclosed by Vulcan much in the same way Varchi describes his own reaction to the Accademia picture: an assembly of gods gaze intently at the naked bodies of the amorous couple and, overcome by erotic fascination, emulate their adulterous acts. The strongly physical aspect (both in form and in action) of the Accademia picture further coincides with the development of Lucretius’s Epicurean philosophy within Florentine society (see, for example, Alison Brown, “Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social and Political Context of Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies 9 (2001): 11–62). Venus and Cupid both hold a single arrow and are emblematic of “wounded” lovers (victims of voluptas) discussed by Lucretius in Book 4 of his De rerum natura:

when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus … he strives towards the source of the wound and craves to be united with it and to transmit something of his own substance from body to body…. Venus teases lovers with images. They cannot glut their eyes by gazing on the beloved form, however closely. Their hands glean nothing from those dainty limbs in the aimless roving over all the body.

In his Fiammetta, Boccaccio vividly describes how Venus is herself subject to Cupid’s arrows. In this respect, the Accademia picture lends meaning to its numerous and even more lascivious variants, the most important being Bronzino’s Allegory (London, National Gallery), the aim of which, according to Robert Gaston, “was to represent more alluringly, more truthfully, the phenomenon of human erotic love and its consequences than poetry itself could do” (“Love’s Sweet Poison: A New Reading of Bronzino’s London Allegory,” I Tatti Studies 4 (1991): 249–88, at 273).

Bettini’s study of the vernacular would have made him fully cognizant that there are not two loves, but a single amorous experience that is the source of all art and inspired thought. As Giorgio Agamben elucidates in his study of the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, the pneumatic spirits of love (spiritelli d’amore) cause a pathological experience through which contemplation and concupiscence join; love is a mortal disease through which the lover assumes the dark saturnine mask of a malady (Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald Martinez [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]). This pathological experience is testified by the sickly dark figure half-hidden in the altar dedicated to love at the left of the Accademia composition. What is more, the brooding terrain portrayed in the background of the painting may not be the result of a disinterest in landscape on the part of Michelangelo or Pontormo, as the catalogue suggests (189). For Petrarch, the land of Venus is actually sour (agra), recognizable as “bare and sparse” (nuda e magra) to the good (buoni) who do not fall victim of love (Triumph of Love, 4.109–11).

The five essays of the present catalogue contain the heart of the authors’ arguments on the Accademia painting, and whether or not one agrees with their findings on this admittedly complex image, the information in the individual entries tends to be repetitive or tangential. The reader should also be cautious of the numerous errors and omissions in the English translations of the Italian contributions. In the end, Venere e Amore: Michelangelo e la nuova bellezza ideale does make the audience more aware of the need for further study of this highly coveted object.