When Mama Blaster was a student at the University of Texas, the Blanton Museum was a few rooms in the Art Building across campus. Today, it is a large spacious building, filled with natural light and beautiful artworks.
The painting "An Allegory with Venus and Time" by Domenica Piola is on permanent display in the 2nd floor European Art section. It features he bearded figure of Time (with his hourglass) handing the Goddess Venus a mature rose, reminding her that beauty is as fleeting as time.
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"FLEETING TIME
Vanitas, a Latin word for emptiness, refers to a type of painting that captures the effect of fleeting time. It derives from a passage in Ecclesiastes in the Bible: “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! (Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas!)” To remind the viewer that beauty, wealth, and worldly pleasures demise with time, artists represented flowers and delicacies that are on the verge of decay. Allegories—combinations of symbols and personifications—also communicate through visual riddles the fragility of human life in the face of time.
Domenico Piola
Genoa, Italy, 1627 - 1703, Genoa, Italy
An Allegory with Venus and Time, circa 1680
Oil on canvas
154.1 cm x 113.6 cm (60 11/16 in. x 44 3/4 in.)
The Suida-Manning Collection
467.1999
In this allegory, Time, with his hourglass, presents Venus, the goddess of love, with a mature rose, as if to remind her that earthly love is as fleeting as a rose’s bloom. In response, Venus reveals her higher identity as a symbol of enduring spiritual love and divine beauty, a concept that evolved from the rediscovery of the writings of Plato and other ancient philosophers during the Renaissance. Venus here has already disarmed her son Cupid, the god of erotic love, by breaking his bow’s string. He is now unable to enflame uncontrollable desires in people and gods by shooting arrows into them. Domenico Piola, the leading artist in Genoa in the second half of the seventeenth century, painted many ceiling frescoes for churches and palaces. Paintings predating 1684 like this one are especially rare, since French naval bombardments in May of that year destroyed most of Genoa, including Piola’s house and studio."
The Jack S. Blanton Museum is located at 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, in Austin, TX. Park in the Trinity Garage. For more on the Blanton museum, see here: (
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