Venus and Adonis

In the 1550s Titian was in his sixties and painting for the most powerful man in Europe, Prince Philip of Spain, soon to be king. For Philip he made a set of large mythological canvases he called poesie, painted poems drawn from Ovid. This is one of several versions of Venus and Adonis that came out of his Venice workshop in those years. Venus twists round to hold back her lover, a hunter, who pulls away toward the boar that will kill him by dusk. Whether Titian's own hand carried this particular canvas, or a gifted assistant repeated a composition he had already sent to Madrid, is still argued. The museum reads certain passages, like the trembling light on the cloth beneath Venus, as the touch of the master himself.