/internal/media/dispatcher/165393/fullVenus Showing Mars Her Hand Wounded by Diomedes1810[Johann Nepomuk Schaller]Johann Nepomuk SchallerTyrolean marbleThe bas-relief that accompanies Leopold Kiesling’s Mars and Venus with Cupid was conceived only after the sculptural group had been completed. For its subject, the sculptor Johann Nepomuk Schaller chose an episode from the Iliad. Aeneas, the mythical progenitor of ancient Rome, narrowly escapes death in battle against Diomedes. His mother, Venus, is wounded in the hand during the encounter. Schaller depicts the moment when Venus shows her injury to Mars, the god of war, and asks him for his horses so that she may return to the Olympus. In the background, the divine messenger Iris can be seen restraining the horses of the chariot. The relief was set into the wall of the Imperial Picture Gallery at the Belvedere Palace in 1827, but it was not mounted onto the base of the Mars and Venus with Cupid group until 1923. Sculpturehttps://sammlungtest.belvedere.at/objects/8357/rdf