Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Venus and Adonis
Also titled Venus en Adonis
Bartholomeus Spranger (Antwerp, 1546–1611)
c. 1585 - c. 1590
- Medium
- panel, oil paint (paint)
- Classification
- painting
- Dimensions
- height 135 cm x width 109 cm
- Museum
- Rijksmuseum
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
About this work
Venus, the goddess of love, warns her lover Adonis of the danger of the hunt. In vain, however, for he is killed by a wild boar. On the left, Cupid, the god of love, already gestures in despair. The tall, slender figures with small heads are characteristic of Spranger’s style. The hilly landscape is ‘old-fashioned’: the artist derived it from an early 16th-century painting.
