Workshop of Titian, 'Venus and Adonis', about 1554

Venus and Adonis

Workshop of Titian

Not on display

About the work

Overview

Naked Venus, the goddess of love, throws her arms around handsome young Adonis to stop him from going out to hunt. The story is told in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Venus falls in love with the youth Adonis when Cupid accidentally wounds her with one of his arrows. She goes hunting with Adonis but tells him not to pursue the fiercer prey (wolves, bears, lions and boars). One morning when Venus sets out 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. From her lover’s blood she creates a fragile flower whose petals are scattered in the wind, named anemone (‘wind flower’ in Greek).

This picture is one of many versions of the subject painted by Titian and his studio. The most famous was delivered in 1554 to Prince Philip, later King Philip II of Spain, and is now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. The National Gallery’s canvas was probably painted by an artist in Titian’s workshop, following his by then established design.

In-depth

After a night of lovemaking, naked Venus, the goddess of love, throws her arms around handsome young Adonis to stop him from going out to hunt. Cupid sleeps on a grassy bank, his bow and quiver of arrows are hanging unused from a tree. Without Cupid’s dart Venus is unable to detain her lover and other thoughts are now on his mind. He holds his feathered spear in one hand, and has wound the leads of his three hounds around his upper arm. His large hound seems to catch the scent of a boar, indicating the future tragedy to come. The dramatic movement in the picture contrasts with the stillness and intensity of the couple’s gaze, which recalls that between Bacchus and Ariadne in Titian’s earlier painting for Alfonso I d‘Este, Duke of Ferrara.

The best known version of the story of Venus and Adonis appears in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Venus falls in love with the youth Adonis when Cupid accidentally wounds her with one of his arrows. She goes hunting with Adonis but tells him not to pursue the fiercer prey (wolves, bears, lions and boars). One morning when Venus leaves in her sky-borne chariot, Adonis goes hunting and his hounds rouse a wild boar. He spears but only wounds the boar, which turns on him and sinks its teeth into his groin. Venus hears Adonis’s groans, leaps from her chariot and finds him dying. She mourns her lover’s death and from his blood creates a beautiful but fragile flower whose petals are quickly scattered in the wind, which she calls anemone (’wind flower‘ in Greek).

In this painting, Titian has combined past, present and future in one image. Venus’s state of undress and the overturned flagon indicate the night that preceded the scene, while Adonis’s large hound seems to catch the scent of the boar, indicating the future, just as Venus appears to sense Adonis’s impending death. Everything depends on the choice Adonis now makes. The tragic ending of the story is suggested by the second figure of Venus in her chariot among the clouds. It was one of Titian’s most sophisticated narrative ideas and one so popular that he would frequently repeat it. However, Titian’s scene departs significantly from Ovid’s story. In the Metamorphoses, Venus doesn’t try to stop Adonis from leaving to hunt, she simply warns him against hunting the fiercer prey, and it is she who leaves him.

Titian’s Venus is modelled on a figure in an ancient Roman relief sculpture, known as the Bed of Polyclitus. Titian’s choice of classical subjects and sources is typical of the Italian Renaissance rebirth of interest in classical antiquity. It also reflects the debate at the time about the relative merits of painting and sculpture, known in Italian as the paragone. He here demonstrates how suggestively he can paint a figure from behind, in contrast to the frontal depiction of the heroine in one of his other popular mythologies, Danaë, with a version of which now in the Wellington Collection, London, he had explicitly paired his most famous rendition of the subject, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, painted about 1553–4 for Prince Philip of Habsburg, King of Spain from 1556.

This picture seems to be the first surviving version of the subject following the Prado picture, but Titian had come up with the design probably as early as the 1520s and had painted a number of versions prior to the 1550s. The National Gallery’s canvas seems to have been painted by an artist in Titian’s workshop working from a prototype, possibly the subsequently altered version now at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, which seems to have served as a working model in Titian’s studio over a number of years.

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. Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis published in 1593 may reflect some knowledge of Titian’s work.

Key facts

Details

Full title: Venus and Adonis
Artist: Workshop of Titian
Artist dates: active about 1506; died 1576
Date made: about 1554
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 177.9 × 188.9 cm
Acquisition credit: Bought, 1824
Inventory number: NG34
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection
Previous owners: John Julius Angerstein

Alexander Day

Provenance

NG 34 seems first to be recorded in the collection of Duke Jacopo Salviati (1607–1672) in Palazzo Lungara in Rome by Bellori. It appears in an inventory notarised in September 1668 of ‘pitture che esistono parte nella nostra Casa di Roma e parte in quella di Firenze’ – no. 30, ‘un Adone ritenuto da Venere, con alcuni cani a Lascio, grande al naturale, figure intere. Mano del Titiano; alto 8 e largo oncie 5, in tele’. The Rape of Ganymede here catalogued as by Mazza (NG 32) was in the same collection. Both were displayed in the audience chamber of Palazzo Lungara in the first years of the eighteenth century. They both passed into the Colonna collection as part of the dowry of Caterina Maria Zefferina Salviati when she married Prince Fabrizio Colonna in 1718, and in 1732 they were removed from the ‘primogenitura Salviati’ and incorporated as a distinct legal unit within that of the Colonna. By 1739 they were both hanging in the new Stanza de’ Quadri of Palazzo Colonna, where they are also recorded in the printed catalogue of the collection in 1783. The painting was sold in 1798, apparently to a certain Giovanni de’ Rossi, and was acquired soon afterwards by Alexander Day, who exhibited it in Brook Street, London, in the winter of 1800–1 and sold it on 6 May 1801 to John Julius Angerstein together with Mazza’s Rape of Ganymede and Gaspard Dughet’s Landscape with Abraham and Isaac (NG 31). Angerstein’s collection was acquired as the foundation of the National Gallery in 1824.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Nicholas Penny, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings’, vol. 2, ‘Venice 1540–1600’, London 2008; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2012

Shakespeare: Staging the World

The British Museum

19 July 2012 - 25 November 2012
2013

American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World

The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston)

29 September 2013 - 19 January 2014

Bibliography

1822

T.F. Dibdin, Aedes Althorpianae, London 1822
1823

J. Young, A Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of Pictures of the Late John Julius Angerstein, Esq: Containing a Finished Etching of Every Picture, and Accompanied with Historical and Biographical Notices, London 1823
1824

W. Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting: With a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England Since the French Revolution, London 1824
1854

G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being and Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss. […], vol. 2, trans. E. Eastlake, London 1854
1877

J.A. Crowe and G.B. Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times, London 1877
1922

J. Farington, The Farington Diary, ed. J. Greig, 8 vols, London 1922
1924

C. Holmes, 'Titian's Venus and Adonis in the National Gallery', The Burlington Magazine, XLIV/250, 1924, pp. 16-22
1936

H. Tietze, Titian: Leben und Werk, 2 vols, Vienna 1936
1946

E. Tietze-Conrat, 'Titian's Workshop in His Late Years', Art Bulletin, XXVIII/2, 1946, pp. 76-88
1957

B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works, with an Index of Places: Venetian School, 2 vols, London 1957
1959

Gould, Cecil, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Venetian School, London 1959
1960

F. Valcanover, Tutta la pittura di Tiziano, Milan 1960
1969

R. Pallucchini, Tiziano, Florence 1969
1969

E. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic, New York 1969
1969

H.E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: The Religious Paintings, 3 vols, London 1969
1975

D. Rosand, 'Titian and the "Bed of Polyclitus"', The Burlington Magazine, CXVII/865, 1975, pp. 242-5
1976

M.C. Tanner, Titian, the Poesie for Philip II, Phd Thesis, New York University 1976
1977

J. Mills and R. White, 'Analyses of Paint Media', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, I, 1977, pp. 57-9
1981

J.C. Nash, Poesie for Philip II, Phd Thesis, John Hopkins University 1981
1987

Gould, Cecil, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools, London 1987
1988

A. Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano: Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento, Rome 1988
1990

L. Freedman, 'A Nereid from the Back: On a Motif in the Italian Renaissance Art', Storia dell'arte, LXX, 1990, pp. 323-36
1993

'Acquisitions 1992', J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, XXI, 1993, pp. 101-63
1996

W.R. Rearick, 'Titian's Later Mythologies', Artibus et historiae, XVII/33, 1996, pp. 23-67
1996

M. Brock, 'Titien et Véronèse Adonis à l'épreuve de Vénus', in F. Siguret (ed.), Andromède, ou, le héros à l'épreuve de la beauté: Actes du colloque international, Paris 1996, pp. 225-51
1997

R. Goffen, Titian's Women, New Haven 1997
1998

S. Cohen, 'Animals in the Paintings of Titian: A Key to Hidden Meanings', Gazette des beaux-arts, CXL/132, 1998, pp. 193-212
1998

F. Russell, 'Venus and Adonis', Christie's Magazine, 1998, pp. 38-9
1998

J. Wood, 'Peter Oliver at the Court of Charles I: New Drawings and Documents', Master Drawings, XXXVI/2, 1998, pp. 123-53
1999

E.J. Sluijter, 'Emulating Sensual Beauty: Representations of Danaë from Gossaert to Rembrandt', Simiolus, XXVII/1-2, 1999, pp. 4-45
1999

B.D. Sutherl, 'A Subtle Allusion in Titian's Venus and Adonis Paintings', Venezia cinquecento, IX/17, 1999, pp. 37-52
2000

P. Costamagna, 'La collection de peintures d'une famille florentine établie à Rome: L'Inventaire après décès du duc Anton Maria Salviati dressé en 1704', Nuovi studi, V/8, 2000, pp. 177-233
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
2001

F. Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings, London 2001
2001

V. Rosen, '"Diletto dei sensi" und "diletto dell'intelletto". Bellinis und Tizians "Bacchanalien" für Alfonso d'Este in ihrem Rezeptionskontext', Städel-Jahrbuch, XVIII, 2001, pp. 81-112
2002

S. Bracken, 'Copies of Old Master Paintings in Charles I's Collection: The Role of Michael Cross (fl.1632-60)', British Art Journal, III/2, 2002, pp. 28-31
2003

J. Habert, 'The So-Called "Pardo Venus": A Farewell to Giorgione', Apollo, CLVII/496, 2003, pp. 46-54
2003

K. Hosono, 'Venere e Adone di Tiziano: La scelta del soggetto e le sue fonti', Venezia cinquecento, XIII/26, 2003, pp. 111-62
2004

A. Ávila, 'Venus y Adonis durmiendo a proposito de Pablo Veronés', Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte, XVI, 2004, pp. 73-90
2004

J. Lawson, 'Titian's Diana Pictures: The Passing of an Epoch', Artibus et historiae, XXV/49, 2004, pp. 49-63
2005

A. Bayer, 'North of the Apennines: Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings in Venice and the Veneto: The Triumvirate: Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto', Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, LXIII/1, 2005, pp. 6-35
2007

Élisa de Halleux, "Vénus et Adonis", "colorito" et "disegno": Un idéal amoureux androgyne pour la peinture à l'huile?', Studi tizianeschi, V, 2007, pp. 166-81
2008

Penny, Nicholas, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, 2, Venice, 1540-1600, London 2008
2008

V. Markova, 'Considerazioni sulla nuova versione del "best seller" di Tiziano: "Venere e Adone"', Arte veneta, LXV, 2008, pp. 145-57

About this record

If you know more about this work or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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