A Continental Mythological Antique Oil on Canvas of Venus and Adonis
Price upon request
A large 19th century Continental Mythological Oil painting on Canvas of Aphrodite (or Venus) and Adonis, after the 16th century painting by Titian (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Circa 1850
Dimensions:
Frame: 57.5" x 56"
Canvas: 47 1/4" x 45 3/4"
Venus fell desperately in love with Adonis and was chasing him to mate with him, but Adonis was more interested in hunting. Aphrodite begged Adonis to give up the dangerous sports he enjoyed because she could not bear to lose him, knowing that the young man would have a terrible end. Adonis ignored her advice and was killed while hunting by a wild boar, that was actually God Ares.
Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty, identified with Venus by the Romans. She was known primarily as a goddess of love and fertility and occasionally presided over marriage.
Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio, known in English as Titian, was a Venetian painter during the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, 'from Cadore', taken from his native region. Titian was the most admired artist in Europe, and these mythologies offered him the opportunity to produce explicitly erotic images - barely clad or nude nymphs, goddesses and mortals, all the more alluring for the sensuousness of the artist’s manipulation of pigment. 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.’)
