A Female Nude with Putti in a Landscape

Description

Throughout his career, Delacroix constantly looked back to the work of the Old Masters, as in this study after an engraving of a painting by the sixteenth-century Venetian artist Veronese. In the painting—Unfaithfuness, or Infidelity, from the series Allegory of Love, now in the National Gallery in London—a semi-nude woman reveals her body to one man while passing a note to another. In our drawing only the men’s hands, touching those of the woman, remain. The outline of the putto in the lower right matches the more fleshed out form of the child in the lower left of the sheet. The putto seen below the woman’s left hand plays a portable keyboard in the painting.
This was not the first time that Delacroix was attracted to the engraving after Veronese. In 1837 he made a wash drawing of the engraving (now at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Around 1850, when he was commissioned to execute the central ceiling panel of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, he turned again to the engraving, executing both the Michigan drawing and one at Chicago. In the latter Delacroix limited his study to the eroticized form of the woman’s back and her upturned foot. The semi-nude woman served as the model for the figure of Juno in the Louvre painting—one of several in the upper right who hold themselves aloof from Apollo’s slaying of the python.