Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Adonis.
The gallery
Venus and Adonis
Paolo Veronese, c. 1580
Veronese's Prado canvas shows Venus clinging to Adonis as he rises for the hunt — the doomed youth already half-turned toward the boar that will kill him. Soft Venetian colour wraps a myth of love that cannot hold him.
The Death of Adonis
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1614
Rubens stages the aftermath in the Israel Museum: Venus rushes to the fallen Adonis while the fatal boar still lurks in the landscape — grief and blood painted with Baroque urgency.
Venus, Adonis and Cupid
Annibale Carracci, c. 1590
Carracci's Prado painting freezes a quieter moment: Venus and Adonis at rest with Cupid nearby, before the hunt. Classical bodies and cool light make the coming death feel almost inevitable.
Death of Adonis
Sebastiano del Piombo, c. 1512
An early High Renaissance lament in the Uffizi: Venus and her companions gather around Adonis's corpse as the landscape opens behind them — the dying beloved as Venetian tragedy.
In play
Venus and Adonis
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's narrative poem made Adonis the reluctant beloved of Venus — the boar's victim as Elizabethan erotic elegy.
Adonis
English still calls a strikingly handsome man an Adonis — the dying beloved turned into a compliment.
Adonis (plant)
The anemone-like Adonis flower keeps his blood in the spring garden — the youth's wound as a genus of buttercups.