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As noted by Erwin Panofsky, the poem has similarities with Titian's painting, general ones in that Venus has difficulty attracting the very young Adonis, and the specific detail of Venus trying to physically restrain him from going hunting, as in the Titian.
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.
Titian’s Venus and Adonis was greatly admired and proved very influential. He made the subject one of the most popular in secular European painting, and also favoured for small bronze sculptural groups.
Venus and Adonis. In 1635, Peter Paul Rubens created Venus and Adonis, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He followed the mythological story in the Metamorphoses by Ovid, inspired from his love of classical literature and earlier depictions of this scene. [1]
Peter Paul Rubens Flemish. probably mid-1630s. On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 621. Rubens took the subject of this painting from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Accidently pricked by one of Cupid’s arrows, Venus fell in love with the handsome hunter Adonis.
As documented by a famous letter of 1554, Titian conceived the Venus and Adonis for Philip of Spain as a pendant to a second version of the Danaë, painted for him a year or two earlier; and since the latter is clearly based on the Farnese Danaë, there is some logic in supposing that it, too, had an original pendant in the lost Venus and Adonis.
Titian contributed to all of the major areas of Renaissance art, painting altarpieces, portraits, mythologies, and pastoral landscapes with figures. Titian trained under two other seminal Venetian artists, Giovanni Bellini (active by 1459, died 1516) and Giorgione (1477/78–1510).
