Venus is shown crouched on a seat covered by a broad canopy, her hand resting on a ledge on which we see a mirror and a small jar of unguents, when she is surprised from behind by Cupid, who kisses his mother gently on the forehead.

The stamp “G. P. no. 12” (Lugt 2103a) on the back of the drawing tells us that it comes from the ‘Album Sagredo – Borghese’, a vast collection of drawings owned by the Sagredo family of Venice, many of which once formed part of the collection belonging to that illustrious Procurator of St. Mark’s Zaccaria Sagredo (1653 - 1729)[1]. The drawing’s original ownership provides implicit confirmation of its excellence, testifying to the subtly erotic mood that took hold in the figurative arts, and in our case in the depiction of mythology, throughout Europe in the final decades of the 16th century and on into the first twenty years of the 17th. One of the capitals of this taste in European culture, alongside Prague at the time of the Emperor Rudolf II, was unquestionably the Rome of Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini (1592 – 1605). Numerous masters representing a broad range of styles flocked to the papal capital, many of them ending up working on the same projects, which spawned some very successful instances of stylistic cross-contamination. The artist who benefited the most from what he learned in the city, to the point where he was to become the painter of choice in the projects patronised by the Pope himself, was without any doubt Cherubino Alberti, the artist to whom we can attribute this drawing[2].

Born in Borgo Sansepolcro in 1553 and arriving in Rome while still an adolescent, Cherubino Alberti trained with his brother Giovanni in the workshop of Dutch painter and engraver Cornelis Cort. Coming into contact with the masters of the Raphaelesque tradition and, perhaps more importantly, with the figurative repertoire of Classical art, he was prompted to embark on a long career as a draughtsman and engraver of mythological subjects at a time when such items had regained a certain popularity in Rome, after a brief period in the 1560s and ‘70s when they had fallen out of fashion[3]. An excellent yardstick by which to judge this drawing is a famous etching by Alberti depicting the Birth of Venus in which – as indeed in this drawing – we can clearly detect the influence of Michelangelo’s robust female nudes and, of course, of Raphael’s Galatea in the Villa Chigi[4]. Where Alberti’s output as a draughtsman is concerned, in those rare drawings in which he used a brush (given that the majority of his graphic work consisted of rapid sketches with a pen) his skill in using lead white highlights to bring out his figures’ powerful sculptural quality emerges quite clearly, a practice he developed through seeking to transfer onto paper the reliefs of Classical sculptures whose subjects, for example on the front of sarcophagi, he frequently copied with meticulous care[5]. This Venus, built around a rapid movement of the hips that underscores the goddess’s vibrancy, is clearly inspired by images of her carved in the Hellenistic age, their rediscovery during excavations in the Forum area and their subsequent acquisition by the most prestigious Roman collectors of the day offering Alberti the chance to pursue his detailed study of such models from life, so to speak.

An echo of the figure’s pose can be seen in the allegorical images painted by the two Alberti brothers on the walls of the great hall in Palazzo Ruggieri in Rome[6] – particularly the figure of Peace painted by Cherubino on the left-hand wall: thus a date close to that commission, c. 1590, appears to be the most likely date for this drawing.