Vénus et Adonis

Veronese painted this in Venice in the early 1580s, working from Ovid, and he chose the calm moment rather than the tragedy. Adonis has fallen asleep across the lap of Venus, his hand resting on a hunting horn, and she leans over him fanning the heat away. The warning sits at the lower edge. Cupid holds back one of the hounds by the collar, the dog already straining toward the hunt, because it is on that hunt tomorrow that a boar will kill the young man. The way Adonis lies limp across her knees deliberately echoes older pictures of the dead Christ laid on the Virgin, so the ending is folded into the sleep. In the 18th century someone added a tall strip of sky above; a 1988 cleaning cut it back to the wide shape Veronese first gave it.