Venus und Adonis

In the autumn of 1554, Titian shipped this canvas to Prince Philip of Spain, who was in London that year to marry Mary Tudor. It arrived creased and damaged, and Philip wrote back to complain. What he had ordered was one of six mythological scenes Titian called his poesie, painted poems drawn from Ovid. The story is Venus and Adonis, the goddess trying to hold back the young hunter she loves. But look at what Titian does with it. In Ovid, Venus warns Adonis and leaves. Here she clings to him at dawn while he pulls away toward the hunt that will kill him, his dogs already straining on their leashes. That desperate embrace appears in no ancient text. Titian simply invented it, turning a myth into a scene of a woman who senses she is about to lose everything. Cupid sleeps under a tree in the corner, his bow hung up and forgotten.