Venus, Mars and the Forge of Vulcan
Luca Giordano·1660
Historical Context
Venus, Mars and the Forge of Vulcan at the National Gallery of Ireland depicts the mythological episode where the smith god Vulcan — humiliated by the adulterous affair between his wife Venus and Mars — uses his divine craft to forge an invisible net of chains that entraps the lovers in bed. The story from Homer's Odyssey was treated as a comedy of sexual jealousy and craftsmen's revenge, but Baroque painters found in it material for both erotic subject matter and mythological narrative. Giordano's 1660 version brings his characteristic Venetian colorism to the subject: Venus's flesh tones glowing against the darkness of Vulcan's forge, Mars's martial attributes incongruously discarded beside the tender scene. The National Gallery of Ireland holds an important collection of European paintings that includes this alongside other Baroque mythological works, placing Giordano in the context of the international market for sensuous mythological subjects that dominated patrician collecting from Venice to Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.
Technical Analysis
The forge setting provides dramatic lighting effects from the furnace, with muscular Vulcan contrasted against the sensuous figures of Venus and Mars. Giordano's energetic brushwork captures the volcanic workshop atmosphere.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the forge's furnace as dramatic light source — Giordano uses the fire of Vulcan's workshop to create spectacular chiaroscuro effects that are entirely internal to the mythological narrative.
- ◆Look at the contrast between muscular Vulcan working at his forge and the sensuous figures of Venus and Mars — the visual opposition between labor and pleasure, craft and beauty, is the painting's thematic core.
- ◆Find the forge setting's atmospheric details: the workshop of the divine smith is rendered with attention to fire, heat, and metalwork that creates an unusual industrial setting for a mythological scene.
- ◆Observe that the National Gallery of Ireland holds this circa 1660 work — one of many Irish museum acquisitions of Italian Baroque paintings that formed the core of national collections established in the nineteenth century.
