Jupiter, Venus and Mercury

A lost mythological history painting, auctioned in Delft on 24 March 1716 from the estate of the patrician Willem van Berckel as “Jupiter, Venus en Mercurius door J. ver Meer.” Like the lost Visit to the Tomb, it would belong to Vermeer’s early ambitions as a history painter, alongside the surviving Diana and Her Companions. Montias doubted the title, noting that Jupiter, Venus and Mercury do not appear together in any standard myth, and suspected the auctioneer had misnamed a scene of Virtue or Psyche. Michiel Plomp later linked it to a Leonaert Bramer drawing after a Jordaens composition of Venus complaining to Jupiter in Mercury’s presence, from the Psyche legend, recorded in a Delft album of 1652–53 that Vermeer could plausibly have known. Some popular accounts date the sale to 1761, but scholarship gives 1716.