BOOKS / 'The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Watteau to David' - Colin Bailey: Rizzoli, 50 pounds

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Naughty but nice? The amours of the Olympians gave 18th-century French masters scope for acres of cream-cake flesh and compositions as grandiose as that self-important century demanded, as Colin Bailey shows in his weighty, definitive study The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Watteau to David (Rizzoli pounds 50). Above: Noel-Nicolas Coypel's 'The Rape of Europa'