Cupid for Chicago

Of all the 937 paintings in the permanent collection of the Chicago Art Institute, two most important to Director Robert Bartholow Harshe are Rembrandt's Girl at the Open Half-Door and El Greco's Assumption of the Virgin. Last week Director Harshe had a third picture to share honors with this notable pair. At a reported price of $200,000, Institute Trustee Charles H. Worcester bought from Wildenstein & Co. and lent to the Museum for an indefinite period Titian's Education of Cupid.

In the sumptuous color for which the great Venetian is famed, Education of Cupid shows a plump, blonde Venus handing a sheaf of arrows to a Cupid with blue-tipped wings, while a half-nude handmaiden looks on admiringly and two muscular brown satyrs hoist high in the air baskets of doves and fruit.

Tiziano Vecelli (c. 1477-1576), probably the greatest, certainly the most prolific of Venetian painters, piled up a great fortune, lived to be 99. He painted Chicago's Cupid at the age of 85. Announcing that he began to understand what painting meant only after he passed 90, in his later years he worked on seven or eight pictures at once, impatiently used his finger tips more than his brushes in spreading paint. For grandiloquent allegory Education of Cupid has few equals in the U. S., perhaps only Venus and the Lute Player, now in the Metropolitan, The Rape of Europa, bought years ago by Boston's canny Mrs. Jack Gardner, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.