Venus and Mars

The story of Venus and Mars

Mars is out cold. His armor is scattered, his mouth is slightly open, and four small satyrs are making off with his lance and helmet while one blows a conch shell in his ear. Venus, fully dressed and completely awake, watches him from the other end of the panel with an expression somewhere between fondness and victory. Botticelli painted it around 1483, probably for a wedding chest or a bedroom panel, and it hangs in the National Gallery in London. It is one of the few Renaissance paintings that is genuinely funny, and it has stayed funny for five centuries.

This is a very long image, roughly two and a half times as wide as it is tall, and that shape decides where it goes. It belongs above a bed, a sofa, a long sideboard, or a bench in an entry hall, anywhere with a stretch of wall that a square picture would leave half-empty. The colors are soft: Venus's white gown, Mars's pale skin, a laurel hedge in dark green, and a strip of gray-blue sky. It suits bedrooms especially, and it works in classic, Italianate, or quietly romantic interiors. The Large at 60.1 × 24 in is the headboard size, and the Medium at 40.1 × 16 in fits over a dresser or a console. Anything smaller and the satyrs become hard to see, which would be a shame.

Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Primavera are the obvious companions, painted for the same Florentine circle. Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne is the other great mythological panel with this much mischief in it. More from Sandro Botticelli.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the London panel; the wood grain and the fine craquelure of the original are faintly visible in the print.