igures are just behind them. Both paintings refer to the legendary love affair between Mars the god of discord and war and Venus the goddess of love and beauty. The affair was, as the Roman poet Ovid said, "the best-known story in the whole of heaven" (Ovid 99). But there are different versions of the story throughout classical literature and Wtewael and Botticelli, having different purposes in mind, turned to different sources.
Wtewael's version derives from the story as it was told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (Fredericksen 17). One of the gods told Venus' husband Vulcan about the "shameful behaviour" of the two and Vulcan, forged "slender bronze chains, nets and snares which the eye could not see" (Ovid 98). He hid the chains around their bed and when they met again Vulcan trapped them and they "were held fast in the very act of embracing" (99). Vulcan threw open the doors and invited all the gods in to see the "shameful sight" of the two "close bound together" (99). The gods, Ovid says "were highly amused" and "they laughed aloud" (99).
Laughing out loud is the response Wtewael wanted to evoke in the viewer and he painted the scene with "appropriate raucous humor" (Handbook 107). The painting possesses no deeper meanings than the entertainment provided by the clever story and the shallow moral about the perils of adultery. This is not to say that Wtewael's patron was unsophisticated, however, and the work was undoubtedly painted for "a connoisseur familiar with Ovid's text and capable of appreciating both the artist's skills and the significance of the painting's symbolic details" (Handbook 107). The details do not involve deeper levels of philosophical or moral meanings but are concerned with the identity of the various gods and their responses to the event. In Ovid's text, for instance, an unnamed god "prayed that he too might be so shamed" (99). In Wtewael's painting Mercury, who stands in front of Vulcan, gla...