Vênus chorando Adônis

The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Venus, the goddess of love, has fallen for the young hunter Adonis and dreads the day the hunt will kill him, which it does, when a wild boar gores him. Veronese painted it in Venice, where wealthy patrons wanted exactly this kind of mythology for the walls of their palaces, sensuous and drawn from the poets, kept apart from the sacred pictures they ordered for churches. Titian had made the pairing of Venus and Adonis famous a generation earlier, and Venetian painters went on returning to it. Veronese gives us the moment before the loss, Venus pressed close beside the hunter she already senses she cannot keep.