“Les regards dards”: Werner van den Valckert's Venus and Cupid

One of Werner van den Valckert’s most engaging paintings, Venus and Cupid (Fig. 1), turned up recently on the art market and was sold in 2005 to a collector in the United States. ² It is the kind of painting Michael Montias would have loved to possess. I vividly remember Michael’s expression of heightened interest (especially his twinkling eyes) when I explained to him – it must have been in the early eighties – my ideas on how artists structured the viewer’s involvement in many paintings of female nudes in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century.