Venus Discovering the Dead Adonis (c. 1650): Art, History and Details

Venus Discovering the Dead Adonis (c. 1650) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Venus, the goddess of love, urged her mortal lover Adonis to hunt only the easiest game. Yet he insisted on pursuing boar, which eventually gored him to death. In this scene, Venus discovers the young man robbed of his youth, yet the painting eternally preserves him in a state of perfection. This paradox corresponds to wordplay in Italian poetry from the 1600s, with which many artists sought visual parallels in their work. This painting derives from a 1623 poem by Giovanni Battista Marino. The painter remains unknown, although the sophisticated literary reference, dramatic use of light, and vivid use of color demonstrate the artist’s awareness of trends converging in Naples in the mid-1600s.

Object facts

• Title: Venus Discovering the Dead Adonis
• Date: c. 1650
• Culture: Italy, Naples
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 213.5 x 268.7 x 8 cm (84 1/16 x 105 13/16 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 184.4 x 238.8 cm (72 5/8 x 94 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1965.19

A detail from the museum

At left, two putti use a rope to restrain the boar that has just killed Adonis.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sotheby's. Old Master Paintings. Friday, October 8, 1993. Sotheby's: New York, New York.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Golden Anniversary Acquisition,” 1965, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.