The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare
Last Updated August 15, 2024.
[In the following essay, Doebler compares Renaissance pictorial representations of Adonis and Venus with Shakespeare's rendering of these mythological figures in his poem Venus and Adonis.]
Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook,
And Cytherea all in sedges hid.
These words describe one of the “wanton” pictures the drunken tinker from The Taming of the Shrew (1593-94) can expect to enjoy as a lord (Induction, ii. 49-51). The subject of this article is Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593), where the paragon of male beauty betrays no more interest in the goddess of love than he does in the picture offered Christopher Sly. Although Cytherea is hidden from view in the painting, she is anything but unrevealed when she turns up as Venus in the narrative poem. The reluctance of Adonis in the poem to pity so ravishing a Venus has challenged those who have studied Shakespeare's sources. The major source, universally accepted, is Ovid's celebration of the contended love of Venus and Adonis (Metamorphoses, X). The usual explanation for the reluctant Adonis is the conflation of one or two other stories from Ovid.1
The tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Met., IV) is most frequently cited, but the tale of Echo and Narcissus (Met., III) is also mentioned. In both of these stories death concludes the refusal of an attractive fifteen- or sixteen-year-old male to answer the erotic pleas of a woman. Echo is too shy to initiate conversation (as we are led to expect from her name); she never actually touches Narcissus; and, once rejected, she hides in shame. But Salmacis steals reluctant kisses from Hermaphroditus and clings to him in the water until he drowns. The love-sick goddess hiding by the running brook in The Taming of the Shrew passage may also derive from the Salmacis story.
In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare lowers the age of Ovid's Adonis (iam vir) to that of a bare adolescent: “red for shame, but frosty in desire” (l. 36). Adonis even comes close to saying that he is not yet capable of the act of love. He tells Venus to measure his “unripe years,” comparable to a green plum, difficult to pluck and sour to the taste (ll. 524-28). When Venus finally drags Adonis on top of her, “All is imaginary” (l. 597). Shakespeare stresses the physical maturity of Venus in her size and strength and underlines her erotic experience in the passage recalling her mastery over Mars. Despite invincibility in war, Mars is the foolish captive led in triumph at the end of a red-rose chain by love and beauty (ll. 97-114).
Venus, the misleader of grown manhood, is all the more dangerous as the temptress of youth. Among Shakespeare's most comic effects, often observed by critics, is a Venus who tucks a “tender boy” under her arm after plucking him from his horse (ll. 30-32).2 Ovid describes the comedy of Venus, for that matter, not in the episode with Adonis, but in her adultery with Mars, cited by Venus in Shakespeare. What Shakespeare's Venus leaves out, however, is the well-known conclusion to the story: the exposure of both lovers to the laughter of the gods by her husband Vulcan (Met., IV). Renaissance variations on the story of that triangle include Tintoretto's comic ridicule of Vulcan, more in the medieval tradition of the Merchant's Tale of January and May than that of the classical sources beginning in Homer (Odyssey, VIII). [A] Tintoretto painting creates a dramatic scene, with a dog barking at the poorly hidden Mars.3
The emblem tradition of Venus as temptress of youth, furthermore, creates that striking disparity of scale that provides Shakespeare with so many comic possibilities. See, for instance, the woodcut in Guillaume de la Perrière's La Morosophie (Lyons, 1553), no. 3.4 The accompanying emblem poem underscores the idea that the young man is just coming into adolescence. Don Cameron Allen, who writes of Adonis as caught between the hard hunt of life and the soft hunt of love, calls Shakespeare's Venus “a forty-year-old countess with a taste for Chapel Royal altos.” Referring back to Ovid, Allen says “that in tone, purpose, and structure the two poems have little to share. … Shakespeare's intent and plan are as different from that of Ovid as his Venus … is from the eternal girl of the Velia.”5
The greatest difference is in the restrained sexuality of the Venus in Ovid. Dressed as a virginal Diana hunting harmless game, she is content to haunt the presence of Adonis. They finally sit upon the lawn in the shade of a tree so that she may tell him the cautionary tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes. Her head resting gently upon his breast, Venus combines words with kisses. The tale over, she leaves at once, believing Adonis fully convinced of the dangers of hunting savage prey. The digression told by Venus is a double warning. Atalanta and Hippomenes, driven wild by lust on consecrated ground, are turned by the offended Cybele into raging lions. The lions are yoked to the chariot she rides as the Great Mother of all creatures. Shakespeare eliminates this digression for the sake of describing the antics of a stallion and a mare in heat, an episode used by Shakespeare's Venus to endorse erotic fulfillment.
Ovid, furthermore, sets the tone for the tragedy by a recounting of Adonis' incestuous ancestry as the child of Myrrba and Cinyras. Adonis is the offspring of his sister and his grandfather, a seduction of father by daughter, the son conceived in darkness, cursed, and wept over. The fate of Adonis completes a cycle of retribution arising from illicit passion. Venus, more than anything, is trying to arrest the fateful process. Her love is protective, reserved, and maternal, in no way rapacious. Ovid's Venus, dressed as a chaste Diana, is closer to the Heavenly Venus in The Symposium, the Celestial Venus of the Neoplatonists, and even the idealized Venus in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love6 than she is to the heaving creature we find at the beginning of Shakespeare's poem. Whether he would wish to do so we have no way of knowing, but the Adonis in Ovid has no need to protect his chastity.
The critical issue in our understanding of Shakespeare's art, therefore, is not so much the reluctance of his Adonis as it is the rapacity of his Venus. The painfully shy Echo in Ovid is totally different, but not even Ovid's Salmacis can account for the degree of change Shakespeare is making when he casts Venus as a frenzied older woman driven by comic lust for a very young man barely emerging from boyhood.
A number of other suggestions for the changes have been made by literary scholars. Often cited are two songs from works by Robert Greene: Perimedes the Black-Smith (1588) and Never Too Late (1590). The songs, both saccharine and mildly comic, stress a naive, indeed callow, Adonis. In the one, Venus pleads for the pity of a beloved who dares not even look at her; in the other, “Wanton Adonis” sits “toying on her knee,” he blushes when she kisses him, and she argues that his youth justifies taking pleasure in love.
It is more likely that Shakespeare deferred to Spenser rather than to Greene, who attacked Shakespeare in Groatsworth of Wit (1592). The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590, just three years before Shakespeare's poem. Spenser's description of The Garden of Adonis (FQ, III.vi.29 ff.) owes much to the tradition of the mythographers, who stressed the resurrection of Adonis in the spring by Venus as an Earth Mother, after his death caused by the boar as a symbol of winter.7 Earlier in Book Three is Spenser's account of the tapestries in “Castle loyeous” (FQ, III.i.34-38). The costly “clothes of Arras and of Toure,” hanging in the long chamber, depict a number of scenes: Venus overcome with desire, Venus wooing Adonis, “the boy” asleep in a bower and bathing in a fountain, her plea to forgo the hunt, Venus mourning his death, and his metamorphosis into “a daintie flowre.” Spenser says that Venus “Entyst the Boy” with “sleights and sweet allurements,” but the poet concludes that she “did … steale his heedelesse hart away.”
Another reference to Venus and Adonis based on visual representation, also rendered in cloth, is the fleeting description of the embroidery on the sleeve of Hero in Marlowe's epyllion:
Her wide sleeves green and bordered with a grove,
Where Venus in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis that before her lies.
(I. 11-14)
Hero and Leander was written in 1593, the year Venus and Adonis was published, and a number of scholars have conjectured that Shakespeare might have seen in manuscript the Marlowe poem, so like his own in genre.
Nor has it escaped the attention of literary scholars that a considerable amount of Renaissance art is devoted to Shakespeare's subject. Painters and graphic artists who have rendered the attraction of the goddess of beauty to one of the most beautiful men in mythology include Tintoretto (1518-94), Cambiaso (1527-85), and Veronese (1528-88),8 to say nothing of the countless representations of Venus alone or with her other companions.
The artist most frequently mentioned by students of Venus and Adonis, however, is Titian. He treated the subject both in the Pardo Venus at the Louvre and in the Prado Venus and Adonis. In the Louvre canvas Adonis hunts a gentle stag while Venus appears to be sleeping. The Prado painting shows Adonis trying to break away from a clinging Venus, and it is thus more closely related to the circumstances of Shakespeare's poem. The first to suggest a parallel between the Prado version and Shakespeare's reluctant Adonis was the editor A. H. Bullen, in 1905; but the painting has been mentioned by students of literature a number of times since, and it is extensively discussed as a source by Erwin Panofsky in his posthumous Problems in Titian (1969).9 Panofsky cites a letter written by the artist to Philip of Spain in 1554, reporting the shipment of Venus and Adonis. The painting was sent by way of Madrid to London, where Philip was living briefly as the consort to Mary Tudor, and the canvas stayed in England for many years after Philip left for the Continent in 1555. The original finally ended up at the Prado, but many contemporary copies were made on canvas. One of the earliest, which may have been the copy Titian kept for himself, is now in London, at the National Gallery since 1824. The original apparently stayed in the Royal Collection of England until after the writing of Venus and Adonis. It was perhaps there even as late as 1636, when it is first reported in Spain. Even if Shakespeare, whose plays were increasingly honored by command performances at court, had no access to the original canvas, he may have known one of the several copies, or at least the widely distributed prints. Prints were executed by both Guilio Sanuto (dated 1559) and Martino Rota (ca. 1520-83).10
In the letter from Titian, the artist suggested that his royal patron hang Venus and Adonis as a companion piece to Danaë in a Shower of Gold, also by Titian and already in Philip's collection. The artist observed that the female nude is seen from the front in his Danaë and from the back in his Venus and Adonis. Other aspects of the female body are promised in two projected paintings, one of Perseus and Andromeda and the other of Jason and Medea. According to Panofsky, Titian's turning about of his nude in Venus and Adonis for the sake of delighting in a woman's back meant a rewriting of the myth, for which he was criticized by Raffaello Borghini in 1584. In Ovid's account, it is only after the departure of Venus for Cyprus that Adonis ignores her warnings and resumes the hunting of dangerous animals. He does it after her back is turned in another sense.
Other Renaissance pictures usually show one of two scenes: Adonis happy in the lap of Venus, as in the Veronese at the Prado; and Venus lamenting his death, as in several works by Cambiaso.11 The mutual attraction of the lovers is particularly stressed in an engraving by Jacob Matham (1571-1631). In the Matham, Venus wears the magic girdle that makes her irresistible.12 In the episode painted by Titian, however, Adonis tears himself away from the embrace of Venus in order to pursue the hunt. The artist here revives a motif of antique art known as the Leave-Taking of Adonis. This motif occurs, for instance, in the high relief from a second century a.d. Roman sarcophagus in the Lateran Museum.13 The Ovidian episode of the Leave-Taking of Venus is thus converted and dramatized by Titian into the Flight of Adonis, with Cupid impotently asleep. Panofsky concludes that Titian's Prado version of Venus and Adonis is the source that inspired Shakespeare's reluctant Adonis.
But Titian is also consistent with Ovid in a way that Shakespeare is not. He retains the emphasis upon the conflict as vocational rather than erotic. The hunt is the center of disagreement, as in Ovid. Titian rewrites his myth only slightly. He extends the visit of the goddess of beauty until her conflict with Adonis can become physical as well as verbal. Titian provides the basis for a Mannerist treatment stressing physical movement, rather than a High Renaissance presentation of static loveliness. As for the back of Venus, the sorely disappointed Philip complained to the artist of the way its paint was damaged in transit. Titian's own interest in this detail of anatomy probably reflects in part his continuing concern with the Renaissance paragone debate between painting and sculpture. In several of his other pictures Titian goes to considerable lengths to answer the claim of the sculptors that they alone can render a figure from several points of view.14
An aspect of the painting seemingly overlooked by art historians, but suggesting comparison with Shakespeare's poem, is the use of animals as a symbolic comment on the central figures. The three dogs tied to the left arm of Adonis seem to restate the conflict implied within him. His powerful torso twists from the embrace of Venus, but his expressive eyes are turned back upon her pleading beauty. Two of the dogs, fangs bared, strain on their cords, eager for the hunt; but the third turns in hesitation, as if unsure of the day's plan. The conflicts are both internal and external in more ways than one. The right hand of Adonis grips the boarspear; the left hand restrains the dogs. In common with almost all Renaissance representations of Adonis is the way Titian combines an athletic male body with a head erring toward soft femininity. Shakespeare retains this conventional tension between male firmness and an undercutting aesthetic appeal,15 but he forgoes conflict within Adonis for the sake of external debate. The closest Shakespeare comes to creating the narrative moment rendered by Titian is in the lines immediately following Adonis' refutation of Venus' deliberate confusion between procreative love and mere lust:
With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;
Leaves love upon her back deeply distress'd.
(ll. 811-14)
Shakespeare does use the technique of animals as a comment on the main action, but in other than a subjective way. In the digression of the stallion and the breeding jennet, animal activity parallels or contrasts with the external behavior of the goddess and her beloved. Instead of Ovid's elaborate story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, which concludes with a brief transition back into the original narrative through the metamorphosis of the lovers into savage lions, Shakespeare substitutes a consistently relevant but much shorter episode. The precise relevance of the stallion and the breeding jennet to Venus and Adonis, however, has been much debated. One critic thinks the unbridled stallion a symbol of the animal lust which Adonis wisely rejects; another finds a parallel between the jennet and Adonis as a male coquette. But most interpreters agree that the digression corrects or mirrors the main narrative action in some way; and no one has suggested that it restates a conflict within either Venus or Adonis.16 Perhaps Shakespeare himself provides the clearest artistic link between this digression and the rest of the poem. Venus uses the example of the runaway stallion to encourage Adonis in love: “Let me excuse thy courser, gentle boy, / And learn of him, I heartily beseech thee, / … / O learn to love …” (ll. 403-7). Adonis replies by contrasting the maturity of the horses to his own youth, comparable to “… the bud before one leaf” unfolds (l. 416). The rhetoric is pointed toward the factual surface rather than toward psychological or philosophical depths. The poem is more material than the painting, and the painting more subjective than the poem.
We will probably never know whether Shakespeare knew the Titian design. Even if it could be documented that he did, we would still debate whether or not the painting should be elevated into a source for the poem. What we do know is that two Renaissance artists of the first rank chose the same subject: the explicit rejection of Venus by Adonis. A comparison of poem and painting—analogues at least—brings us to a number of conclusions.
Neither artist shows any hesitation in altering the details of the original narrative in Ovid in order to serve a new artistic effect. Each draws upon a form outside of Ovid, in the case of Shakespeare the epyllion, used by Lodge only a few years earlier, and in the case of Titian the Leave-Taking of Adonis, found in antique designs.17 Titian seems to have introduced a conflict within Adonis to augment the physical tearing away from Venus. Shakespeare draws upon the comedy associated with the name of Venus, turning that less toward the coyness of a reluctant Adonis than in the direction of a frenzied Venus, whose emotions are driven first by lust and then by grief. Both artists are “Mannerist” in their focus upon conflict. The conflict in Titian twists bodies and communicates irresolution; the more theatrical conflict in Shakespeare pits body against body and rhetoric against rhetoric.
Notes
-
Useful summaries of scholarship on the sources of the poem are Hyder E. Rollins, ed., New Variorum Poems (Philadelphia: I. B. Lippincott, 1938), pp. 390-405; and T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 1-93 (the reluctance of Adonis, pp. 87-92). Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), I, 161-76, confines the sources to Ovid.
The edition used for Ovid in this article is the Loeb Metamorphoses, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916); the text I quote for Venus and Adonis is the New Arden edition of the Poems, ed. F. T. Prince, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1960).
-
The comedy in the behavior of both Venus and Adonis is stressed by Rufus Putney in two articles: “Venus and Adonis: Amour with Humor,” Philological Quarterly, 20 (1941), 533-48, and “Venus Agonistes,” University of Colorado Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1953), 52-66. For Adonis as the primary object of Shakespeare's ridicule, compare J. D. Jahn, “The Lamb of Lust: The Role of Adonis in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 11-25.
The continuing debate about the tone of Venus and Adonis is summarized by J. W. Lever, “The Poems,” Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 19-22; and Norman Rabkin, “Venus and Adonis and the Myth of Love,” in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene: Univ. of Oregon Press, 1966), pp. 20-32. The critical consensus seems to be that the poem combines a serious moral content with amusing sexuality, and that the two aspects are not necessarily reconciled. “Ambivalence” has been the critical term applied with increasing frequency.
-
The canvas by Tintoretto, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, was owned by the English painter Sir Peter Lely (d. 1682), who probably acquired it from the estate of the Earl of Arundel. Bought by the Bavarian state in 1925, it now hangs at the Pinakothek. See Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Pinakothek, Munich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), p. 174. Thomas Howard, Second Earl of Arundel and Surrey (1586-1646), was the first great English art collector and patron.
The Mars and Venus myth is a good example of how the classical stories were interpreted both in malo and in bono. In bono is one of the versions suitable to Antony and Cleopatra and The Faerie Queene, esp. Bk. II, where the lovers symbolize discordia concors. See Raymond B. Waddington, “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus Did with Mars,’” Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 210-27; and Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele, eds., Books I and II of “The Faerie Queene,” the “Mutability Cantos” and Selections from the Minor Poetry (New York: Odyssey Press, 1965). The story in malo, with moralized English commentary from the mythographic tradition, was published a year before Venus and Adonis. Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke's Yvychurch (1592, rpt. New York: Garland Press, 1976), fols. 31v-32r.
-
Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1967), col. 1751, illustrate this emblem.
-
Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 42-43. (Allen's essay on Venus and Adonis first appeared in 1959.)
A useful critical article on the general subject of Ovid and Elizabethan poetry is Caroline Jameson, “Ovid in the Sixteenth Century,” in Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 210-43.
-
See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; rpt. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1967), esp. pp. 129-69. Panofsky argues that the Titian should be retitled “The Twin Venuses,” the nude one on the right Celestial, the clothed one on the left a Venus Genetrix. Venus Genetrix is the honorable procreative love called amor vulgaria by Ficino in his Convito. Ficino thinks lust a madness and unworthy of the name of Venus.
Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1957), pp. 47-48, argues strongly that Shakespeare's Venus is in part Ficino's amor vulgaria, but Dickey thinks her vulgar in the common sense as well. Dickey concludes: “Adonis is not ripe for either sort of passion.” The fourth poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, whether by Shakespeare or not, probably describes the situation intended in Venus and Adonis as well as any other attempt. “But whether unripe years did want conceit, / Or he refused to take her figured proffer,” he “would not touch the bait.”
As for the argument of Shakespeare's Venus to procreate, it is probably meant to be viewed as hypocrisy (in sharp contrast to the same theme in the first seventeen Sonnets). Venus is driven by simple lust at this point in the poem.
-
See George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, ed. of 1632, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 490-94.
Shakespeare, of course, used Arthur Golding's translation (1567), but Sandys is an important record of iconographic commonplaces contemporary with both Golding and Shakespeare. Most scholars seem to agree that Shakespeare knew both Ovid's Latin and Golding's translation. I rely on Ovid, not only because I find no significant differences between the two but also because Ovid is the source shared by all the Renaissance artists I discuss.
For an account of Ovid and the mythographers, see Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), Chap. 7. Allen (p. 186) calls Abraham Fraunce (note 3 above) the “conspicuous English precursor of Sandys.” Fraunce's account of the meaning of the Venus and Adonis story (fols. 43v-45r) is substantially the same as Sandys': a fertility myth.
An article relating the poem to the mythographic tradition in terms other than the fertility myth of Venus and Adonis is S. Clark Hulse, “Shakespeare's Myth of Venus and Adonis,” PMLA, 93 (1978), 95-105.
-
See Andor Pigler, Barockthemen: Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Budapest: Verlag der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1956), II, 239-40. Pigler lists at least five versions of the subject by Cambiaso, six by Veronese or atelier, etc.
-
Bullen (1905) is quoted in Rollins' Variorum ed.: “Titian's famous picture … affords sufficient proof that Shakespeare was not the first to depict Adonis' coldness” (p. 397). The two Titian paintings are discussed, among others, by T. W. Baldwin (note 1 above), p. 92; and by Eugene B. Cantelupe, “An Iconographical Interpretation of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Ovidian Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 14 (1963), 141. The fullest application of Titian thus far, however, is Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 150-55. Panofsky cites the Variorum, but he leaves the very strong impression that he is the first to mention Titian as an explanation of the reluctant Adonis in Shakespeare (p. 153). The Panofsky theory is cited as if seminal by Judith Dundas, but rejected: “Style and the Mind's Eye,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37 (1979), 327.
-
An extant copy of the print by Sanuto is in the Print Collection of the British Museum, in the Titian (Myth) portfolio (Sloane Collection, XI-93), along with contemporary graphics of the same Titian by at least two other Renaissance print-makers (Sloane Collection, XI-95; and 1950-2-11-156). The Rota is listed in Adam Bartsch, Le Peintre-graveur, 21 vols. in 17 (Vienne: J. V. Degan, 1803-13), XVI, 282.108.
-
Panofsky, Problems (note 9 above), p. 152, and Baldwin, p. 13. The works by Cambiaso are illustrated by Bertina Suida Manning and William Suida, Luca Cambiaso: la vita e le opere (Milan: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1958), figs. 121, 123, 124, and 128.
-
The Jacob Matham is listed by Bartsch, III, 229.16.
-
William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1977), p. 55, ill. p. 57. Keach is correcting Panofsky, who states that Titian is the first artist to render Adonis leaving Venus. Titian, at least, seems to have been the first artist in the Renaissance to revive the classical motif, and he establishes the highly dramatic prototype imitated by many artists, including Rubens. (Keach reports 1636 as the year of the first documentation of the original painting in Spain, p. 242, n. 12.)
-
See especially Titian's Saint Sebastian (Brescia), where both the front of the body and the entire back of the shoulders are shown. The painting is illustrated by David Rosand, Titian (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978), pp. 92-93. The standard catalogue raisonné is Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, 3 vols. (London: Phaidon Press, 1969-75). For information about the London version of Venus and Adonis, see Cecil Gould, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Venetian School (London: The National Gallery, 1959), pp. 98-102.
-
The concept of vigorous young manhood destined for accomplishment amid hardships, but distracted or threatened by the powerful aesthetic attraction it exerts upon others, is a theme shared by the paintings of Venus and Adonis (or Mars), Shakespeare's narrative poem, and his Sonnets.
-
Robert P. Miller, “Venus, Adonis, and the Horses,” ELH, 19 (1952), 249-64, believes that the digression serves three intentions: the comic ridicule of the romantic love claimed by Venus by using the horses to reveal such courtship as mere lust; a contrast of the run-away stallion with Adonis, to the moral advantage of Adonis; and a contrast of the breeding jennet, serving the natural law of propagation, with the base motives of Venus, who seeks only pleasure. A similar approach is that of Panofsky (Problems, p. 118 and n.), who believes that the digression equates the unbridled horse to unbridled passion. In sharp contrast is Jahn (note 2 above, pp. 21-22), who calls Adonis a coquette, to whom the jennet is at first similar. In the end, however, she is more “honest” than Adonis for relenting to the sexual excitement she has aroused in the stallion.
-
See Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), “Introduction.” Donno (p. 6, n. 3) suggests that “epyllion” is primarily a nineteenth-century (rather than a classical) term, but she acknowledges its usefulness in describing the Renaissance “erotic-mythological verse narrative” as a minor epic.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.