There has, perhaps, never been a richer and more beautiful subject-picture painted than this glowing canvas, or one which brings more vividly before us the magnificence of the pageants which made such a part of Venetian life in the golden age of painting. It is all strength and splendour, and escapes the hectic colour and weaker type which appear in Bordone's "Last Supper" and some of his other works. In 1538 he went to France and entered the service of Francis II., painting for him many portraits of ladies, besides works for the Cardinals of Guise and of Lorraine. The King of Poland sent to him for a "Jupiter and Antiope." At Augsburg he was paid 3000 crowns for work done for the great Fugger family.
No one gives us so closely as Bordone the type of woman who at this time was most admired in Venice. The Venetian ideal was golden haired, with full lips, fair, rosy cheeks, large limbed and ample, with "abundant flanks and snow-white breast." A type glowing with health and instinct with life, but, to say the truth, rather dull, without deep passions, and with no look that reveals profound emotions or the struggle of a soul. From what we see of Bordone's female portraits and from some of the mythological compositions he has left, he might have been among the most sensually minded of men. His beautiful courtesan, in the National Gallery, is an almost over-realistic presentment of a woman who has just parted from her lover. His women, with their carnation cheeks and expressionless faces, are like beautiful animals; but, as a matter of fact, their painter was sober and temperate in his life, very industrious, and devoted to his widowed mother. About 1536 he married the daughter of a Venetian citizen, and had a son, who became one of the many insignificant painters of the end of the sixteenth century. Most of his days were divided between his little Villa of Lovadina in the district of Belluno, and his modest home in the Corte dell' Cavallo near the Misericordia. "He lives comfortably in his quiet house," writes Vasari, who certainly knew Bordone in Venice, "working only at the request of princes, or his friends, avoiding all rivalry and those vain ambitions which do but disturb the repose of man, and seeking to avert any ruffling of the serene tranquillity of his life, which he is accustomed to preserve simple and upright."