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Lot Essay
Vanloo's first biographer, Michel-Franois Dandré-Bardon, recorded that this spectacular mythology was painted in 1735, only a year after the young painter had returned to Paris following a decade of studying in Italy, and in the same year that he was admitted as a full member of the Académie Royale. With its clear colors (reminiscent of Carlo Maratta) and exquisitely drawn, almost classical forms, the painting is identical in style to Vanloo's contemporaneous moreau de reception, the famous Apollo flaying Marsyas (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris): submitted to the Académie in July 1735, it was this painting that was responsible for launching Vanloo's career as the most successful and admired history painter of his generation.
Venus requesting Vulcan to make arms for Aeneas takes as its subject the story of Venus's nocturnal visit to the forge of Lemnos, related by Virgil in the The Aeneid (VIII:395-453), in which the goddess of Love pleads with her estranged husband, the deformed god of fire and master of the forge, to fashion a set of armor for her illegitimate son, the Trojan hero Aeneas, who is about to go into battle in Latium. Resorting to a craven form of persuasion, Virgil tells us that Venus 'throws her snowy arms round about him, and fondles him in soft embrace', thus insuring the aid of her cuckholded husband. Vulcan quickly relents and orders his assistants, the three-eyed Cyclopes, to make arms for the 'brave warrior'.
Vanloo modeled his composition on two acclaimed contemporary prototypes: Franois Boucher's sensational version of the subject that was executed for the art collector Franois Derbais in 1732, and Charles-Joseph Natoire's moreau de reception on the same theme, which he presented to the Académie in 1734. So closely did Natoire follow Boucher's influential composition that it bordered on plagiarism, and Vanloo's painting deviates little more from Boucher's model, except to reverse its orientation in mirror image. Vanloo's painting differs from Boucher's sensual fantasy principally in its more sober tone. Whereas Boucher's painting is 'irrepressible in [its] energy, uncompromising in [its] erotic power' as Colin Bailey has recently observed, Marie-Catherine Sahut notes that Vanloo's picture is dignified, his 'inspiration more severe', his Venus more modest, while Vulcan -- with his emphatic gestures and eyes rolled upwards -- resembles more closely one of Lebrun's saints than the amorous husband of Boucher's canvas. Boucher brought the gods down to earth and incarnated them in human flesh; Vanloo returns his deities to their Olympian aerie.
Venus requesting Vulcan to make arms for Aeneas takes as its subject the story of Venus's nocturnal visit to the forge of Lemnos, related by Virgil in the The Aeneid (VIII:395-453), in which the goddess of Love pleads with her estranged husband, the deformed god of fire and master of the forge, to fashion a set of armor for her illegitimate son, the Trojan hero Aeneas, who is about to go into battle in Latium. Resorting to a craven form of persuasion, Virgil tells us that Venus 'throws her snowy arms round about him, and fondles him in soft embrace', thus insuring the aid of her cuckholded husband. Vulcan quickly relents and orders his assistants, the three-eyed Cyclopes, to make arms for the 'brave warrior'.
Vanloo modeled his composition on two acclaimed contemporary prototypes: Franois Boucher's sensational version of the subject that was executed for the art collector Franois Derbais in 1732, and Charles-Joseph Natoire's moreau de reception on the same theme, which he presented to the Académie in 1734. So closely did Natoire follow Boucher's influential composition that it bordered on plagiarism, and Vanloo's painting deviates little more from Boucher's model, except to reverse its orientation in mirror image. Vanloo's painting differs from Boucher's sensual fantasy principally in its more sober tone. Whereas Boucher's painting is 'irrepressible in [its] energy, uncompromising in [its] erotic power' as Colin Bailey has recently observed, Marie-Catherine Sahut notes that Vanloo's picture is dignified, his 'inspiration more severe', his Venus more modest, while Vulcan -- with his emphatic gestures and eyes rolled upwards -- resembles more closely one of Lebrun's saints than the amorous husband of Boucher's canvas. Boucher brought the gods down to earth and incarnated them in human flesh; Vanloo returns his deities to their Olympian aerie.