Venus at Vulcan's Forge

In this canvas, Boucher goes to the heart of Virgil’s narrative in the eighth book of The Aeneid, in which Venus induces Vulcan to forge arms for her mortal son Aeneas, champion of the Trojans against the Greeks. Vulcan strains forward, presenting the sword toward Venus with a sense of urgency and yearning clearly visible on his face. Seized by passion, he is totally under the sway of Venus, a fact Boucher stresses by the doves and putto reclining on his lap and by the putto at Venus’s side, who aims his arrow directly at Vulcan’s heart. Vulcan has succumbed to love, a fire more subtle and more powerful than that with which he forges steel.