Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus

Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus (c. 1612-13) at the Hessen Kassel Heritage Collection illustrates Terence's famous maxim from the Eunuchus — that without the gods of wine and grain, the goddess of love grows cold — by showing Venus shivering in the cold while Bacchus and Ceres, her missing companions, are absent. The subject is a variant on the Venus Frigida theme that Rubens painted at about the same period, both works demonstrating his ability to translate Latin literary conceits into vivid visual form through the combination of mythological figures and allegorical personification. The Hessen Kassel collection, accumulated by the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and dramatically dispersed during the Napoleonic period before partial recovery, represents one of Germany's major historical accumulations of European Baroque painting. The subject's appeal to humanist collectors who appreciated both the Terentian source and the visual wit of the composition connects it to the learned patronage culture that appreciated Rubens's classical learning alongside his painterly mastery.

The composition groups three figures representing wine, food, and love in an intimate arrangement. Rubens' warm flesh painting and rich palette create an atmosphere of sensual indulgence appropriate to the classical theme.

This allegorical painting from 1612 illustrating the classical proverb has been conserved over the centuries. The cool flesh tones that are essential to the painting's meaning have been carefully preserved. The canvas has been relined and the surface cleaned.