(Pieve di Cadore 1490–1576 Venice)
Venus and Adonis,
inscribed lower right: TICIANUS / F,
oil on canvas, 172.5 x 207.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Aristocratic collection, until 1982;
where acquired by the grandfather of the present owner

Venus and Adonis is one of Titian’s most celebrated compositions, repeatedly replicated by the master and his assistants. The artist’s main source of inspiration was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book X, 532–39 and 705–9), according to which, the goddess of beauty fell in love with the handsome Adonis, a great lover of hunting. Despite Venus’ warnings, during a hunting trip the young man was killed by an enraged boar. The desperate goddess then resorted to metamorphosis to preserve the memory of her beloved, transforming him into a beautiful, scented anemone.

Titian chose to depict the moment when Adonis sets off on his last hunt, armed with a spear and horn, while holding a pack of dogs on a lead. It is dawn, Apollo’s chariot can be glimpsed to the east among the clouds, while Cupid is still dozing under a tree. Venus tries – unsuccessfully – to hold her young lover in a desperate embrace to prevent him from leaving, a detail missing in literary sources that is probably due to an invention by Titian himself.

Among the numerous known versions, several variants can be found, relating to the degree of autography, the size of the canvas, the number of dogs depicted, the breadth of the landscape and the presence or absence of other minor details. It is generally believed that the oldest variant in the group is the Prado Museum version, dating from around 1554. However, it is possible that the artist conceived the subject even decades earlier: the Small Boy with a Bird in the National Gallery in London, stylistically attributable to the master, or his close circle and datable to the 1520s, may in fact be a study for a lost version of Venus and Adonis belonging to the so-called ‘Farnese type’, a name adopted by scholars to distinguish it from the different ‘Prado type’.

The dating of the canvas now in Madrid is linked to a letter sent by Titian to Philip II in the Summer of 1554, in which the artist announced to the sovereign that he was sending a ‘painting of Venus and Adonis’ to be set up in his dressing room as a pendant to the famous Danae, also now in the Prado. A few months later, the painting was sent to London, on the occasion of Philip’s wedding to Mary Tudor, and in the following years it was followed by four other canvases with mythological subjects, which together created the series of so-called Titian Poesie (the works, now divided between American and European museums, were recently brought together on the occasion of the exhibition Titian: Love, Desire, Death organised by the National Gallery in London in 2020).

The success of Philip II’s Venus and Adonis was enormous and immediate, definitively consecrating Titian’s international status. Already in 1555, the Venetian scholar Lodovico Dolce was singing its praises, emphasising the allegorical subtlety and strong erotic charge of the image of the nude Venus seen from behind, an element that certainly contributed greatly to the subject’s success among collectors (L. Dolce, Lettere di diversi eccellentissimi huomini, raccolte da diversi libri, Venice 1555, pp. 530–534; the description of the painting is contained in a letter by Dolce to Cardinal Alessandro Contarini).

The versions in the National Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome, as well as some paintings currently in private collections, probably derive from the Madrid Venus and Adonis, or another similar lost prototype. The canvas presented here also rather faithfully reproduces the typology of the Prado Venus and Adonis, with a few variations in the rendering of the sky and landscape, and the dimensions are similar (the Madrid canvas measures 186 x 207 cm); a trompe l’oeil label on the ground records Titian’s as the creator of the composition.

The Venus and Adonis for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese is recorded in an early seventeenth century engraving and a number of canvases were made later by Titian’s workshop, such as the one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the one in the National Gallery of Arts in Washington. Compared to the ‘Prado type’, these compositions present a closer cut, with a less wide landscape, the presence of only two dogs instead of three, and a different position of Cupid, which as mentioned is related to the Boy with a Bird in London.

The inventories of many important collections mention paintings depicting Venus and Adonis attributed to Titian or his collaborators: among the most well-known are those of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, the Contarini family in Venice, the Duke of Orléans in Paris, Queen Christina of Sweden in the Riario Palace in Rome and Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna. To date, only part of these canvases have been identified, which makes the appearance of a new version a significant element of reflection on the fortune of Titian’s work and the mechanisms of transmission of his models within his entourage.

A technical analysis of this painting is available on request (please refer to the old master paintings department).