Venus

In 1509 Lucas Cranach painted his first Venus, a subject that he would return to time and again in various compositions and formats right to the end of his life. Although these paintings at first draw on Italian models, his depictions of the goddess with their small heads and slender bodies with high narrow waists and long legs increasingly diverge from the canon of proportions established by the art of antiquity.
Isolated against the deep black background and standing on an almost equally abstract landscape of pebble-strewn ground, the figure emerges in its outright nakedness and sensuality. The diaphanous veil draped across her body conceals nothing, leaving it to the beholder to see in her either a modestly concealed Venus or an erotic nude of the goddess of love.
The panel was acquired by Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein for the Princely Collections in 2013. While it was on display in an exhibition at Aix-en-Provence in France the “Venus” was seized as a ‘forgery’ in March 2016. None of the allegations could be substantiated, however, and the French authorities ultimately ordered it to be returned to the Princely Collections. After the return of the painting on 11 May 2021, all the scientific analyses of the support and paint layer subsequently commissioned by the Princely Collections from leading laboratories in the UK and France additionally confirmed that the painting derives from the time of its dating (1531) and is not a forgery.