Venus mourning Adonis

Venus, the ancient Goddess of Love, crouches over the dead body of her young lover, the mortal Adonis, and cradles his head in her hands. The source of inspiration for this oil sketch, by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), is found in ancient sources. The Ancient Greek poem, The Lament for Adonis, by Bion of Smyrna (c.120 – c.57 BCE), describes the beautiful Adonis who has had his thigh pierced with the tusk of a boar in a hunt, and is found lying fatally wounded. Venus with her loose, unbraided hair mourns her lost love, saying: ‘Awake Adonis, awake for a little while, and give me one last kiss'. As told in Bion’s poem, Rubens shows Venus’s attendants, known as the Three Graces, wailing loudly in grief and anguish, while her son Cupid reaches behind to remove the quiver of arrows from his back in distress. Rubens uses colour to visually unite the different areas of the composition. The viewer’s eye is encouraged to move from the white highlights on Venus’s right shoulder, to Adonis’s ribcage, and across to the swathe of gauzy white fabric being used to wash his wounded thigh. Contrasting are the dark blues and blacks of the sky, and the vivid reds of Venus’s cloak and Adonis’s shed blood. On the right-hand side of the composition, one of Adonis’s hunting hounds laps at the pool of his master’s blood. 

Rubens had spent several years in Italy (1600-08) copying antique sculpture, including the so-called Crouching Venus, then at the court of Mantua, which is similar in pose to the Venus depicted here. Rubens was highly educated and would have known of the classical writings of Ancient Greece and Rome, such as the poetry of Bion. This preparatory oil sketch (or modello, in Italian), relates to the finished painting The Death of Adonis (with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces), that is now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.