Venus Frigida
Artist / maker
Peter Paul Rubens (painter)Date
1614Period
17 centuryCollection
Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
A grinning satyr, a follower of the wine god Bacchus, is trying to arouse the frozen Venus from her chilly state with the aid of a horn of plenty filled with ears of corn, grapes and other fruit. Seated beside her on a quiver of unused arrows, winged Cupid is shivering from the cold. Venus is squatting down, with three-quarters…
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A grinning satyr, a follower of the wine god Bacchus, is trying to arouse the frozen Venus from her chilly state with the aid of a horn of plenty filled with ears of corn, grapes and other fruit. Seated beside her on a quiver of unused arrows, winged Cupid is shivering from the cold. Venus is squatting down, with three-quarters of her back to the viewer, adopting the pose of the famous Roman sculpture of Venus from the 1st century CE, which Rubens had admired in the Palazzo Farnese during a visit to Rome (now in Naples, Archeologico Nazionale, inv. no. 6297). Well-read contemporaries recognised that this scene illustrated a popular saying from a comedy by the Roman playwright Terence (185-159 BCE): ‘Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus’, that is to say: ‘Love becomes chilly without food and drink’.
The panel is part of a small group of classicising paintings that Rubens unusually signed and dated both 1613 and 1614: Jupiter and Callisto (Kassel, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. GK86), Susanna and the elders (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, inv. no. 603), The Flight into Egypt (Kassel, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. GK87), The Lamentation of Christ Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 515) and Cupid cutting his bow (Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. 1304).
The fact that the original painting was almost square is documented by a 17th-century copy in West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire. The core piece of 121 x 95 cm was enlarged with two planks on the left, adding 69 cm to the width. Two extra planks, each 20 cm wide, were added at the top and on the right. Dendrochronological analysis has revealed that the added wood came from a tree that was felled in 1640 at the earliest. In other words, the enlargement of the landscape dates from after Rubens’s death and was done by a painter who is as yet unidentified. It is known that in the 18th century the scene was wrongly identified as ‘Jupiter in the guise of a satyr stealing up on Antiope, daughter of the King of Thebes’.
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