The Death of Adonis

Rubens had spent eight years in Italy soaking up Titian and the antique, and he came home to Antwerp with everything he had learned. Around 1614 he painted this scene from Ovid. Venus finds her lover Adonis dead, gored by a wild boar on a hunt she had begged him to avoid, and she reaches for him as the Three Graces weep and a small Cupid sobs at his feet. Rubens arranged the mourning bodies the way painters arranged the dead Christ lowered from the cross, so a pagan love story takes on the shape of a Christian lament. The pale, heavy body of Adonis is the still centre of all that motion.