Titian - Jupiter and Anthiope. Pardo Venus 1540-1542
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Jupiter and Anthiope. Pardo Venus 1540-1542
386x196cm oil on canvas
Louvre, Paris, France
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
<< Previous G a l l e r y Next >>
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The Pardo Venus is a painting by the Venetian artist Titian, completed in 1551 and now in the Louvre Museum. It is also known as Jupiter and Antiope, since it seems to show the story of Jupiter and Antiope from Book VI of the Metamorphoses (lines 110-111). It is Titian's largest mythological painting, and was the first major mythological painting produced by the artist for Philip II of Spain. It was long kept in the Royal Palace of El Pardo near Madrid (not to be confused with the Prado, a purpose-built museum), hence its usual name; whether Venus is actually represented is uncertain. It later belonged to the English and French royal collections.
Analysis of its style and composition shows that Titian modified a Bacchanalian scene he had begun much earlier in his career by completing the landscape background and adding figures. For Sidney Freedburg it was "probably in substance an invention of the later 1530s, though significantly reworked later; it is full of motifs and ideas that have been recollected from an earlier and more Giorgionesque time, ordered in an obvious and uncomplicated classicizing scheme."
Though, if Antiope is the nude, the painting meets the basic definition of Titian's famous poesie series, mythological scenes from Ovid painted for Philip, the painting is typically not counted in the series, either as it was begun well before Titian used the term in a letter to Philip, or because the nude is indeed Venus, in which case no such scene is described by Ovid.