Excerpt of the Colnaghi description (2014):
[...]
A classical goddess, whose beautifully modelled figure shows the influence on Cranach of Italian Renaissance paintings and classical sculpture, our Venus, standing on a curved rocky platform suggestive of a lunar landscape, also belongs to an older and more local German medieval tradition of planetary deities. Cranach's earliest depictions of Venus and among his first essays in the treatment of the female nude, are the large-scale painted Venus and Cupid of 1509 in Vienna and a woodcut of the same subject, which bears the date 1506, but which most scholars now believe was also executed around 1509. In both cases the figure of Venus was clearly influenced by Dürer's famous engraving of Adam and Eve and, via Dürer, from classical prototypes such as The Capitoline Venus. The anatomy of the goddess, broad-hipped, rounded and full-breasted, is ultimately Roman in derivation and very different from the petite small-breasted nudes of Cranach's later career. The Vienna Venus, the first life-sized painting of the goddess in northern art, is the nearest Cranach gets to replicating the conventions of the classical nude and both her anatomy and certain stylistic traits may, as Kenneth Clark suggested,[17] show first-hand acquaintance with Italian Renaissance prototypes. The black background, for example, which provides such an effective foil to the nude (an idea to which Cranach returned in the Frankfurt and Colnaghi Venuses) might well derive from paintings from the Botticelli workshop such as the Venus in Berlin, or from examples by Lorenzo Costa or Lorenzo di Credi, both of whom adopted this motif to lend a sculptural quality to their painted nudes; the sfumato and subtle play of light over her body, obviously depend ultimately on Leonardo.[18] But even at this early date,[19] the proportions of the body of the Vienna Venus do not conform as closely as Dürer's Eve to the Vitruvian canon, and the figure's swollen belly and rather elongated torso, hark back to North-European medieval traditions of the nude and probably reflect the impact of Cranach's trip to the Netherlands in 1508, where he would have had the opportunity to see earlier paintings of the nude by Memling and the contemporary, eroticized and depictions of Adam and Eve by Jan Gossaert, which Clark found 'curiously indecent.'[20] Also redolent of these earlier northern traditions are the clouds which surround Venus in Cranach's contemporary woodcut, which allude to her role as an astrological planetary deity. The print shows Venus trying unsuccessfully to cover her pudendum with a veil which is being whipped away by the wind, while restraining the young Cupid from drawing his bow - an iconography which presents the male viewer with a rather mixed message at once enticingly erotic and sternly admonitory. Similar mixed messages are conveyed by the painted Venus and Cupid in Vienna, where the alluring image of the goddess of love, serenely restraining her "trigger-happy" son, is accompanied by moralizing Latin verses warning the [presumably male] viewer of the consequences of physical passion: 'Drive out the excesses of Cupid with all your strength so that Venus may not possess your blind heart.'[21] Clearly nudity was perfectly acceptable in Wittenberg, provided it was packaged with a suitably moralizing epithet or legitimized through a classical or biblical text.
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[17] K. Clark, The Nude, 1956, p. 319. pp. 17-18.
[18] Possibly via one of the many copies of the now-lost Leda.
[19] For the clearest exposition of the differences between the proportions of classical/Mediterranean female nudes, comparing the Cnidian Venus with Memling's Venus in Vienna (see Clark, op. cit., pp.17-18).
[20] Op. cit., p. 320.
[21] The original inscription reads: 'PELLE CUPIDINEOS TOTO CONANIME LUXUS/NE TUA POSSIDEAT PECTORA CECA VENUS'.
[http://www.colnaghi.co.uk/venus-0; accessed 10.02.2015]