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There is a precise date for only one version, that in the Prado in Madrid, which is documented in correspondence between Titian and Philip II of Spain in 1554. However, this appears to be a later repetition of a composition first painted a considerable time earlier, possibly as early as the 1520s.
Venus and Adonis. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) Italian. 1550s. On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 608. Tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses inspired Titian to paint what he called poesie, or poetry in paint. Here, Venus tries to stop her lover from departing for the hunt, fearing—correctly—that he would be killed.
The tanned and muscular Adonis is clothed in a dazzling red tunic prefiguring the flower that he is to become; he is the incarnation of a Greek statue, his body standing out against the luminous sky that Venus has abandoned for love of him.
Nov 28, 2022 · No work in the group was more in demand than the one which most shocked his contemporaries, Venus and Adonis, dispatched to Philip in 1554. (It was the bare buttocks that inflamed the 16th century male gaze, the Spanish ambassador finding it ‘too lascivious.’)
Bacchus raised her to heaven. Her constellation is shown in the sky. The painting belongs to a series commissioned from Bellini, Titian, and Dosso Dossi, for the Camerino d'Alabastro (Alabaster Room) in the Ducal Palace, Ferrara, by Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, who in 1510 even tried to commission Michelangelo and Raphael.
The story is told in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. One morning when Venus departs in her sky-borne chariot, Adonis’s hounds rouse a wild boar, which turns on him. Venus hears Adonis’s groans, leaps from her chariot and finds him dying.
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A final indicator of tension in the picture is evoked by the turbulent sky in the background. Diana’s vengeance upon Actaeon was particularly gruesome, transforming him into a stag to be hunted down and torn to pieces by his own dogs. His fate is alluded to in the painting by the stag’s head on top of the pillar.
