Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - art: Help! I've got the same taste in art as Hitler!

Description

It's never pleasant to find you share anything with Adolf Hitler. I'm dismayed and a bit shocked by the National Gallery's discovery that one of my favourite paintings in its collection, Cupid Complaining to Venus by the German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder, was in the art collection of the most destructive human being in history. Now I will never be able to forget this fact when I look at it.

Venus stands naked except for a heavy necklace and a wide-brimmed, feather-pommelled hat, with her arm raised to hold the branch of a tree whose fruits surely make her at the same time an image of Eve. She's thin, angular and tall, with slender thighs and small breasts - a very different and more edgily erotic vision of the nude than you ever see in Italian art, and a look it's tempting to call "modern". Actually, it is medieval.

Original URL

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/03/help_ive_got_the_same_taste_in.html

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/03/help_ive_got_the_same_taste_in.html