1508
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Venus, Mars and Cupid is a 1508 by Marcantonio Raimondi, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see Venus, the goddess of love, standing over Mars, the god of war, while Cupid waves a torch like a victory flag. This print copies a lost painting by Raphael—Raimondi was his favorite engraver. The twisted body of Mars comes straight from a famous broken statue in Rome called the *Belvedere Torso*. Artists back then loved studying old marbles and turning them into new stories. Look up *sfumato* to see how other Renaissance artists softened edges like this.
Raimondi’s fascination with ancient marbles is evident in this allegory of love triumphant over war. He used the Belvedere Torso , a fragment of an ancient marble statue, as his model for the figure of Mars. The dynamic, twisting musculature of the broken sculpture inspired many artists who studied its form and incorporated it into new compositions. Here Mars sits disarmed while Venus and Cupid carry a torch of victory, their carefully modeled, static poses reminiscent of sculptures.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Marcantonio Raimondi, often called simply Marcantonio (c. 1470/82 – c. 1534), was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker whose body of work consists largely of prints copying paintings. He…
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