Allegory with Venus and Cupid (Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time)

Bronzino's most famous painting, made as a diplomatic gift from the Medici to King Francis I of France. At the foreground: Venus kissing her son Cupid — incest as the wages of pleasure. At the upper-left back: a small figure tearing at her hair, her face showing the symptoms of advanced syphilis (sunken eyes, eroded nose). She is officially Jealousy. She is also the disease that swept Europe in the 1490s. Pleasure's price hidden in a court painting. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgallery