Landscape with Venus and Adonis (1580s): Art, History and Details

Landscape with Venus and Adonis (1580s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gillis van Coninxloo (Netherlandish, 1544–1607).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Venus, the goddess of love, is unsuccessful in dissuading her mortal lover Adonis from hunting the boar that would eventually kill him. The artist nestles this story in the foreground of an expansive view with Germanic architecture, rather than a classical setting. Woodlands were relatively new subjects in European painting and this work points toward the full-blown forested landscapes of the 1600s.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with Venus and Adonis
• Date: 1580s
• Creator attribution: Gillis van Coninxloo (Netherlandish, 1544–1607)
• Culture: Netherlands, 16th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on copper
• Dimensions: Framed: 48.3 x 64.5 x 7 cm (19 x 25 3/8 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 37.8 x 53.6 cm (14 7/8 x 21 1/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Flemish
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1962.293

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Thieme, Ulrich, Felix Becker, Fred. C. Willis, and Hans Vollmer. Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelmann, 1907.
• Lurie, Ann Tzeutschler. "A landscape with Venus and Adonis." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art L, no. 11 (November, 1963): 252-258.
• Saisselin,R.G. "Art in an Imitation of Nature." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art LII, no. 2 (February, 1965): 34-44.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.