Love Requests Venus to Return His Weapons to Him
Medium
chalk-manner etching and engraving printed in color
Dimensions
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Classification
Department
Prints
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
James Parmelee Fund
Accession Number
2006.182
Tags
About this artwork
For his aristocratic patrons, Boucher made numerous paintings of intriguing female nudes, thinly veiled as Roman goddesses lounging in luxury. Bonnet’s color chalk-manner prints of similar subjects offered middle-class buyers sumptuous yet affordable versions of Boucher’s wildly popular images. Here, a tiny cupid pleads with Venus for his quiver of arrows as she gazes teasingly at the viewer. Their feathered ends simultaneously conceal and draw attention to her nudity. With cupid’s arrows in her...