Vénus apportant des armes à Enée ("Venus bringing weapons to Aeneas") by Nicolas-André Monsiau

The story of Aeneas and Venus inspired many European painters of 17th- and 18th-century France. The story of Aeneas intersects with that of Troy and the founding of Rome. It offers a wealth of richly illustrated accounts, including his love affair with Dido.

The subject here relates to the Trojan War, whereas classical painters more commonly depict the episode of the founding of Rome recounted by Virgil in the Aeneid, and in particular the scene where Venus brings weapons to her son Aeneas, before he goes into battle. A battle that would decide his settlement in Latium and the founding of Rome. This scene was chosen by Nicolas Poussin (Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts), who greatly influenced Nicolas-André Monsiau, as well as later François Boucher and Charles Natoire (Montpellier, Musée Fabre).

The theme of Venus rescuing her son Aeneas is not the most commonly depicted episode. The theme was probably imposed by the Academy in 1787, when Monsiau applied for approval to exhibit at the official Salon, although it is the second painting conserved at the Château de Maisons, Alexandre domptant Bucéphale, that is mentioned as the work that earned him approval. The theme was in fact treated the same year by Jean Charles Nicaise Perrin (1754-1831), an Aeneas healed of his wounds, kept at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The discovery of the Enée blessé in the Chambre des Sirico in the ruins of Pompeii in 1748 probably made it a theme of interest to academics once again.

Unlike Monsiau, Perrin evokes the use of dictamus, an aromatic plant that the Greeks considered a powerful remedy, as in the painting by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610-1662), Vénus versant le dictame sur la blessure d'Enée (Paris, Musée du Louvre). In his painting, Nicolas-André Monsiau, who trained at the Academy with the neoclassical painter Pierre Peyron, chose a clear, classical composition, with two main figures and a putto, placed as if weightless. The bodies have no density.

While the marmoreal treatment of the flesh is neoclassical, the colors and the intertwining of the bodies, like the putto, are more reminiscent of the world of Boucher or Natoire. Venus is not clearly maternal here: her leg brushes suggestively against Aeneas' arm, blurring representational codes between erotic and Christic scenes, with the blood spilt on her toga.