Venus and Adonis

Ribera signed this canvas in capital letters at the lower left, Jusepe de Ribera, español, valenciano, and dated it 1637. By then he had lived in Naples for some 20 years, and he still introduced himself as a Spaniard from Valencia. The story is Ovid's. Venus was crossing the sky in her chariot drawn by swans when she heard the groans of Adonis, the young hunter she loved, gored by a boar, and she came hurtling down to him. Ribera shows that arrival as a leap into the scene. Adonis lies across a red cloth, which can be read as the colour of the anemone, the flower Venus made spring from his blood, and behind him are a hunting dog and a broken tree trunk. Oddly, the 18th-century accounts of the Corsini collection never mention the picture. It is first described in an inventory of 1826.