Venus and Cupid

Venus and Cupid, dated around 1570 and in the collection of the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, is another of Allori's mythological cabinet paintings produced for the Florentine market during his mature period. The pairing of Venus and Cupid was among the most flexible mythological subjects — encompassing maternal tenderness, erotic play, moral allegory about the relationship between beauty and desire, and pure compositional display of the idealized nude. Allori brought to this subject the full vocabulary of Mannerist figure painting: elegant proportions, complex pose, refined surface. The Musée Fabre's collection, assembled in the nineteenth century by the painter François-Xavier Fabre who bequeathed his collection to Montpellier, includes several significant Italian works. The presence of this Allori in a provincial French museum reflects the wide geographic dispersal of Florentine Mannerist mythological painting through the collecting networks of early modern and modern Europe.

Oil on canvas allows the larger scale appropriate for a compositional display piece. The mythological subject licenses the extended display of the idealized female nude, which Allori renders with the draftsmanly precision learned in Bronzino's workshop. Cupid's small figure provides a foil for Venus's adult proportion.