Venus and Adonis

Venus clinging to Adonis as he sets off for the hunt was one of Titian's most repeated designs, and his workshop painted it again and again. The museum catalogues this canvas, made around 1560, as the work of that workshop. What sets it apart is Adonis's hat, a jaunty cap with a feather, which turns up in only a few other versions, one of them at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. The Titian scholar Harold Wethey called the hat ridiculous. The canvas later belonged to Tsar Paul I of Russia. The Venetian merchant Pietro Concolo brought it back to Italy from Saint Petersburg, Prince Giovanni Torlonia bought it for his collection in Rome, and in 1892 the Torlonia collection passed to the Italian State.