The four main persons on this picture are:
Venus (the female), the Roman Goddess of love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and victory.
Cupid (the boy holding Venus), the Roman God of desire, erotic love, attraction, and affection.
Pleasure (the happy boy on the right), represented by a Putto is an allegorical figure. In an allegorical painting, the figure may be counterpoised to Prudence, representing a choice, or alone, representing the unwisdom of the actors in the painting.
Time (the man above), perhaps Chronos, the Greek God of time.
Symbologically represents time's constant one-way movement, and more generally and abstractly, entropy.
Furthermore.
The figure opposite Time, and also grasping at the drapery, is usually called Oblivion because of the lack of substance to his form—eyeless sockets and mask-like head. The mask-like face of this figure is echoed by the image of two actual masks in the lower right- hand corner.
The old woman rending her hair (behind Cupid) has been called Jealousy—though some believe her to represent the ravaging effects of syphilis (result of unwise intercourse).
The creature at the right-hand side behind Pleasure, with a girl's face and grotesque body, extending
a honeycomb with her left hand attached to her right arm, may represent Pleasure and Fraud.
Cupid, along with his mother (Venus) and the nude Putto, to the right, are all posed in a typical Mannerist figura serpentinata form. A form where figures are spiraled.
The themes of the painting appear to be lust, deceit, and jealousy.
Venus and Cupid form a pale-coloured 'L' that follows the shape of the frame of the picture.
Next we notice that the painter has balanced this 'L'-shaped group by another, this time inverted 'L' formed by the figure of the little boy representing Pleasure together with the head and arm of Time.
This two 'L's form a rectangle which anchors the representation firmly
within the frame; and the stability of the otherwise highly complex composition is thereby assured.
Notice that the entire space is filled with objects or figures; there is no place for the eye to rest. This restless activity of forms throughout the picture is related to the spirit and subject matter of the whole work, which is - agitation and lack of resolution.
Love, pleasure, jealousy and deceit are all entangled together in a formally and intellectually complicated pattern.
The artist has painted the figures with cold, hard outlines and smoothly rounded surfaces. They look almost as if they were made of marble.
The sense of hardness and coldness is intensified by the colours that are used: almost exclusively pale blues and snowy whites, with touches of green and darker blue.
(The only warm colour is the red of the cushion on which Cupid kneels.)
All this coldness and hardness is the opposite of what we normally associate with the sensuous activity that is at the centre of the picture.
By such means a gesture of love or passion, usually tender or burning, is here rendered as calculating and frigid.
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