A painting that shows Venus and Cupid getting it on while a bald guy watches and a man screams in the background was always going to be unsettling. Even by the standards of its subject, though, Agnolo Bronzino’s Allegory With Venus And Cupid is dark. Despite being described as an erotic picture “of singular beauty,” there’s a lot of evidence that it’s really a warning about syphilis. The focus of this theory is the screaming figure in the lower left of the painting. Although classically said to symbolize jealousy or despair, a close examination shows they’re actually very ill. Their fingers are swollen exactly as you’d expect in a syphilis patient, a fingernail is missing, and their hair has signs of syphilitic alopecia. Their toothless gums even suggest mercury poisoning, mercury being the closest thing Renaissance Italy had to an STD treatment. It gets darker. The child showering Venus and Cupid with flowers appears to have pierced his foot on a rose thorn without noticing. Such a lack of sensation would directly result from syphilitic myelopathy. In other words, the painting appears to show the lovers surrounded by syphilis-induced suffering; a vision of what lies in store for them if they get carried away by passion.
