As for the subject of the picture, Mercury, the messenger of the gods (dressed therefore in his winged cap and sandals), is endeavouring to teach Cupid (Love) his letters, of which, according to the Greek story, Mercury was the inventor. Venus, the Goddess of Beauty and the Mother of Love, looks out to the spectator with a winning smile of self-complacent loveliness and points us to the child. She has taken charge meanwhile of Cupid's bow (from which he shoots his arrows into lovers' hearts), and is herself represented (as sometimes in classical gems) with wings, for Beauty has wings to fly away as well as Time and Love. The picture is sometimes called the Education of Cupid, but Love learns through the heart and not through the head, and "if you look at this most perfect picture wisely, you will see that it really ought to be called 'Mercury trying, _and failing_, to teach Cupid to read,' for indeed from the beginning and to the end of time, Love reads without letters, and counts without arithmetic" (_Fors Clavigera_, viii. 238). This famous picture has had a strange, eventful history. It was painted in 1521 or 1522, and a century later it was still in the Ducal Gallery at Mantua. In 1625 Charles I. of England despatched his music master, Nicholas Laniere, to Italy to buy pictures for him. Laniere communicated with a picture-dealer named Nys, who purchased several works from the Mantuan gallery. When the transaction became known, the citizens took it so ill that the Duke would have paid double the money to be rid of the bargain. But Nys would not relent, and the picture was included in the artistic freight which the ship _Margaret_ took to London in 1628. On its arrival, our picture was hung in the king's private apartments in Whitehall. When he was beheaded, and his collection sold, the Correggio was bought for £40 by the Duke of Alva, and taken to Spain. It afterwards passed through several collections, and ultimately into that of Murat, King of Naples. Upon his fall from power his wife took it with her when she escaped to Vienna. During the congress of sovereigns in 1822 her chamberlain communicated with the ministers of all the Powers, with a view to the sale of this and another Correggio (15). Russia was negotiating for the purchase of them when Lord Londonderry, hearing by mere accident of the affair, went to the chamberlain, paid the larger price against which Russia was holding out, and despatched his courier post haste to Vienna to convey the treasures to England. An attempt was made to stop him, but they reached this country almost before the Russians had heard of the purchase.[45] The picture has not come unscathed out of these changes and chances. "Repairs," says Sir Edward Poynter, "are visible in many places. Injudicious cleaning has done even more injury; and it has undoubtedly been deprived of much of that final delicate surface-painting which, in the hands of a great master, does so much to unite a picture into