Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan

Tintoretto's Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan, painted around 1555 and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, treats one of the most popular subjects of erotic comedy in classical mythology — the blacksmith god's trap for his unfaithful wife and her lover, described in Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The subject's combination of divine eroticism, marital betrayal, and social comedy had made it a favorite of Venetian patrician collectors who enjoyed sophisticated mythological painting that could be displayed in bedchambers and private rooms. Tintoretto's treatment is unusually humorous for a painter associated with intense drama: Vulcan lifting the bedcover to expose the guilty lovers, the lapdog whose barking threatens to alert the god, and the visual comedy of divine figures caught in a domestic farce give the painting a lightness rare in his oeuvre. The Bavarian State Painting Collections hold exceptional Venetian works from the sixteenth century through the Wittelsbach dynasty's Italian connections, and this Tintoretto pairs naturally with Tintoretto's companion mythological works and with the extensive Titian holdings in the Alte Pinakothek.

Tintoretto's dramatic foreshortening and theatrical lighting create both sensuous beauty and comic drama, with the luminous nude Venus contrasting with the dark, muscular Mars and the lurking Vulcan.