Венера, оплакивающая Адониса

Nicolas Poussin had not long arrived in Rome when he painted this, around 1626, a French painter in his early thirties teaching himself antiquity in the city that held so much of it. The story comes from Ovid. Adonis, the young hunter Venus loved, has been gored by a wild boar, and the goddess pours nectar over his wound so that a blood-red anemone will spring up where he lies. Poussin lays the body out long across the canvas, and the pose deliberately recalls images of the dead Christ, since this pagan tale of a beautiful youth dying and a flower rising from him was read in his day as an echo of death and resurrection. The wide, frieze-like shape shows a young artist already thinking like the classical reliefs he was busy studying.