Venus and Mars (Botticelli)

A tempera panel painting by the Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli, made around 1483 to 1485, showing the Roman goddess of love watchfully alert beside the sleeping god of war. Four infant satyrs play with Mars's discarded armor and lance, one blowing a conch shell in his ear without waking him, while a swarm of wasps hovers near his head, likely a reference to the Vespucci family whose name means little wasps and who may have commissioned the panel to mark a wedding. Its long, low format suggests it was set into bedroom furniture or paneling. Botticelli drew on the Greek writer Lucian's description of a lost ancient painting of Alexander the Great's wedding, recasting its cupids as satyrs. The panel was bought in Florence by the English collector Alexander Barker and passed to the National Gallery, London, at auction in 1874, the only recorded open-market sale of one of Botticelli's large mythological paintings. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/