Venere e Adone

In 1771 Goya was a young painter in his mid-twenties, scraping together enough money to stay on in Italy, where he had gone to learn from the old masters. He turned out small pictures like this one to sell quickly and cover his costs. The subject comes from Ovid: Venus has found the hunter Adonis dying after a wild boar caught him, a love story cut short in a single afternoon. It is barely bigger than a postcard, only about 12 by 23 centimeters, and you can feel the young artist working in two registers at once, a dark, stormy sky behind and the two figures lit up in bright color in front. A few years later he was back in Spain, painting cartoons for the royal tapestry works.