Cupid holding the reins of Mars' charger - a fragment

This winsome canvas is a fragment from a picture of Venus arming Mars that was part of the celebrated sequence of mythologies and allegories painted for the Emperor Rudolf II. Among the Emperor's earliest commissions for Veronese were the set of four ceiling canvasses now in the National Gallery, London: these were followed by the Choice between Virtue and Vice and the Wisdom and Strength (both New York, Frick Collection), the Venus and Mars (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and its pendant Mercury, Herse and Aglauros (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum), and by Venus arming Mars. The latter was dismembered in the nineteenth century, but the original composition is known from a copy in a Florentine private collection (see Zeri, op. cit, 1959, fig. 29; and Rearick, op. cit., fig. 43), another at Stourhead (National Trust, UK; fig. 1), with fragments of other copies cited by Rearick in a private collection in Rome and at Washington. Of these, that in Rome, with the figure of Mars, had previously been published as autograph by Briganti. The importance the artist attached to the picture is suggested by the calibre of the outstanding drawing for Mars’s armour now in Berlin, no. KDZ 5120 (R. Cocke, Veronese's Drawings, A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1984, pp. 130-1, no. 51), the connection to which was first recognised by Rearick. This fragment, showing Cupid holding the reins of the charger, is the lower left hand corner of the picture. Rearick proposed a date of 1579-80, while Marini places the picture about 1580.

Before being cut, the picture had a celebrated history. It was in the collection of the Emperor Rudolf II from whom it passed, after the Sack of Prague in 1648, to Queen Christina of Sweden, who took the majority of her Italian pictures with her on her abdication in 1654. The Rudolphine Veroneses were to remain together until the dispersal of the Orléans Collection a century and a half later. The histories of the picture of which this fragment formed part and the celebrated Mars and Venus in New York have understandably been confused. The elaborate armour worn by Mars in the picture of which this is a fragment may explain the belief of 1805 that it was a portrait of the Emperor Charles V: its low price then suggests that the picture may have been damaged, which would explain its subsequent dismemberment.