 |
| Venus and Adonis |
Artist:Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
Date:probably mid-1630s
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:With added strips, 77 3/4 x 95 5/8 in. (197.5 x 242.9 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Harry Payne Bingham, 1937
The subject is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (completed 8 A.D). Accidently pricked by one of Cupid’s arrows, Venus fell in love with the handsome hunter Adonis. Rubens shows their leave-taking—a popular subject also famously depicted by Titian in another picture now at The Met. With cavalier indifference to the goddess’s charms and her warnings of danger, Adonis hunted a wild boar and was gored to death. Technical examination indicates that a later hand altered Adonis’s expression to make it less foreboding.
Catalogue Entry
Rubens had a special talent for depicting mythological lovers, based partly on his profound knowledge of classical literature and sculpture, and on the importance of figure studies, based on live models, to his work in general. He was also exceptionally familiar with paintings by Italian artists who might be described as masters of sensuality, such as Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and others.
This large canvas was probably painted about 1635–37, presumably as decoration for a large country house, considering that Adonis was a hunter. The picture’s earliest trace, in the collection of the Elector of Bavaria (until 1706), does not discourage the supposition. The composition is broadly inspired by Titian’s painting of the same subject (Museo del Prado, Madrid), which Rubens copied when he stayed in Madrid in 1628–29. The copy, now lost, is listed in the 1640 inventory of Rubens’s estate.
Titian has been credited with inventing the so-called leave-taking of Adonis, which in any case was a Renaissance embellishment of the story told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, lines 519 onward. Venus, grazed by one of Cupid’s arrows, falls in love with the handsome Adonis. She takes up his occupation as a hobby, wins his love, and then frets about his confrontations with big game. In Ovid’s account she departs first, in her swan-drawn chariot, but Titian and Rubens have Adonis striding off with manly indifference, toward a fatal encounter with a wild boar.
Radiography reveals that the expression of Rubens’s Adonis, in contrast to Titian’s, was originally somber and thus consistent with the Northern European tradition of moralizing Ovid’s tales. In this and in aspects of the composition (especially Venus’s pose) Rubens may have followed an engraving after Crispiin de Passe I, of 1600. But the classical pose of Adonis (recalling the famous Horse Tamers in Rome), Venus’s pillowy charms, Cupid’s precocious wrestling hold, and the muscular ballet that the trio performs are all distinctive of Rubens, whose learning always served his love of humanity.
Walter Liedtke 2012
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
Comments
Post a Comment