Venus and Mars

Mars sleeps the deep sleep of the spent lover while Venus watches, wide awake and unruffled; baby satyrs make off with his lance and helmet, and one blows a conch in his ear without waking him. Love has disarmed war, the old allegory given a wry, domestic turn. The wasps - vespe - buzzing at upper right likely pun on the Vespucci family, hinting at a marriage panel set into the woodwork of a bedchamber. Botticelli's contemporary Simonetta Vespucci, the era's celebrated beauty, appears as a kind of Cleopatra elsewhere in this collection. Mars's slack, foreshortened body is among the painter's most closely observed.