Did you know that Cupid, the god of romantic love, carries two types of arrows? His gold-tipped arrows spark intense passion, while his lead-tipped arrows cause victims to recoil in disgust.
This duality reflects the ancient belief that sexual desire is a normal yet potentially dangerous part of life. Cupid embodies this tension in classical mythology and Old Master paintings. He’s a toddler with lethal weapons.
Love hurts
In a sublime cabinet painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Cupid is the antihero in a tale of love and revenge drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a first-century collection of stories that are irresistible to artists.
In this particular story, the god Apollo kills a misanthropic serpent named The Python by piercing it with 100 arrows. Cupid eyes the epic battle from a safe distance, clutching his little quiver of darts.
Apollo spots the pint-sized archer and quips, “Impudent boy, what are you doing with a man’s weapons?”
In a fit of childish pique, Cupid shoots Apollo with a gold-tipped arrow, making him fall instantly in love with the virginal nymph Daphne. Cupid then strikes Daphne with a lead-tipped arrow, causing her to despise Apollo with every fiber of her being.
Daphne flees, with Apollo in hot pursuit. When she catches sight of her father, she screams for help. Peneus, a river god, swiftly transforms his daughter into a laurel tree to protect her from sexual assault.
In the painting Apollo Pursuing Daphne, Tiepolo captures the dramatic moment when Daphne’s right leg transforms into bark and her fingers sprout branches. Her left leg has already metamorphosed into a tree trunk, rooting her to the spot. Even so, Apollo cannot help but love her. In the story, Apollo kisses Daphne’s bark, but even the wood shrinks away.
And where is Cupid? The little imp is hiding in the shadows, hoping to avoid Apollo’s wrath.
I knew you were trouble
The painting Cupid Complaining to Venus by German artist Lucas Cranach begs a few questions. For starters, why is that little angel covered in bees?
Of course, that’s no angel. That’s Cupid getting stung by bees that caught him stealing a honeycomb from their hive. He’s asking his mother, Venus, how a creature so small can inflict so much pain.
“You’re little, and look how much pain you cause,” she retorts.
The goddess of love and beauty is naked except for a jeweled choker around her neck and a velvet hat trimmed with ostrich feathers on her head. She reaches for an apple while “making eyes” at the viewer, evoking Eve from The Old Testament.
Meanwhile, across the lake, two human figures carefully make their way down a steep mountain path just as the blue sky dissolves into the peach and yellow hues of sunset.
A Latin inscription barely visible in the corner of the canvas holds the key to this painting:
It is a witty warning about the effect of giving in to temptation and transitory pleasure. The four lines in Latin translate as:
“Young Cupid was stealing honey from a hive when a bee stung the thief on the finger. And so it is for us. The brief and fleeting pleasure we seek is mingled with sadness and brings us pain.“
Charlotte Wytema, Curatorial Fellow, The National Gallery, 2022
How did it end?
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, popularly known as Madame de Pompadour, was the clever and witty mistress of King Louis XV. Not coincidentally, she became one of the most influential women in 18th-century France.
Pompadour personally commissioned The Bath of Venus. She probably displayed it at the Château de Bellevue, a private getaway created for her by the French king.
The artist, François Boucher, typically paints in the Rococo style. But here he uses Baroque techniques to create a sense of motion: crisscrossing diagonals, curvilinear forms, and slanting recessions.
Yet the result is pure Rococo: fluffy, theatrical, and a little bit naughty. Venus bears an uncanny resemblance to Pompadour, who apparently had no compunctions about seeing herself portrayed this way.
In fact, the relationship between Louis XV and his mistress probably inspired the painting because it was made when their relationship was shifting from romantic to platonic. After suffering several miscarriages, Madame de Pompadour’s declining health forced the end of their physical intimacy. Even so, they remained devoted friends until her death.
In The Bath of Venus, a wistful-looking goddess disarms Cupid. Is she making peace with the end of a passionate love affair?
I can see you
For more than 300 years, Cupid was hidden underneath a thick layer of oil paint in this painting by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. Who covered up the little mischief-maker? Vermeer? Or someone else?
For years, scholars assumed Vermeer cancelled Cupid. However, during the painting’s restoration at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden museum, the blank wall reacted differently than the rest of the picture.
Tiny paint samples removed from the area revealed the truth: Cupid was covered up after Vermeer died. So conservators removed all of the overpaint using a surgical scalpel and a microscope—a painstaking process that took nearly two years.
In the painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, the young lady’s rosy cheeks suggest she’s reading a love letter and the reemergence of Cupid confirms it.
However, the pint-sized god is using his right foot to trample a black mask—a symbol of deception. This, coupled with an upended bowl of forbidden fruit in the foreground, raises troubling questions about the letter writer’s intentions and his marital status.
Vermeer places a young woman at an open window because she longs to be more worldly. At the same time, the painting-within-a-painting issues a warning: love and deceit rarely co-exist in the real world.
If you see her, say hello
The Worship of Venus is not an easy image to explain. Nor was it easy for Titian to pull off. This canvas contains more figures than any other by the Venetian Renaissance master. He must have wrestled mightily with the spacing and pacing between putti.
The Duke of Ferrara commissioned the painting for his private “man cave”—the legendary Alabaster Chamber. This small room, called a studiolo, was hidden along a secret passageway that doubled as a royal escape route.
To create the image, Titian took a cue from the writings of Philostratus, a third-century scholar who famously described a painting he admired in a villa near Naples:
The cupids are gathering apples; and if there are many of them, do not be surprised. The cupids are many because there are many things men love. But listen carefully, for along with my description of the garden, the fragrance of the apples will come to you.
Philostratus, Imagines I.6
In The Worship of Venus, two women run into an apple orchard while looking at someone just outside the picture plane. Who is approaching?
Historians commonly link this scene to an ancient Roman ceremony in which women implored Venus to wash away their imperfections so they could find true love.
The more I think of it, the happier I am that Venus isn’t on Instagram.
Postscript: If you happen to be in Amsterdam…
Explore Metamorphoses at the Rijksmuseum now through May 25, 2026. See how Ovid, a first-century writer, inspires artists to depict stories defined by lust, jealousy, and the beauty of change.