Why it matters
The hunter Adonis sleeps in Venus's lap while Cupid holds back a sighthound, since Venus had foreseen that Adonis would die on a hunt. The subject comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Did you know?
- It was painted in the early 1580s.
- A 50 cm strip added in the 18th century was removed in 1988.
- Veronese modelled Cupid on a Hellenistic statue of a boy with a goose.
Based on the Wikipedia article Venus and Adonis (Veronese, Madrid) (CC BY-SA 4.0).
