Venus And Adonis

19th century
Venus and Adonis
Alabaster, cm alt. 16
The small sculpture titled Venus and Adonis depicts the goddess in a tender embrace with her beloved. Adonis was a handsome and charming boy who devoted himself to hunting in his spare time. One day, Venus, while watching him walk through the woods, was accidentally scratched by one of Cupid's arrows, falling in an instant into deep love. The strong passion between the two, however, angered Mars, the god of war, who, to single-handedly recover his beloved, devised a very simple plan: he would transform into a boar and inflict a fatal blow to Adonis. . . It happened. While on a hunting trip, young Adonis encounters the animal, which actually conceals the appearance of Mars, which mortally wounds him. The groans of the beloved reached the ears of Venus who rushed to the bed and tried in vain to save him, but Adonis, now dead, had only to descend into hell. Venus' despair was such that the mighty Zeus, taken with pity, left the two beings together: each spring Adonis could return to the world of the living to embrace the beloved Venus and spend part of the year with her; but, when the first colds came, Adonis should have returned to the darkness of death. The sculpture represents a moment of deep intimacy and tenderness between the two young people, the moment captured is that of a tender embrace where Adonis touches the face of his beloved with his fingers while the goddess languidly leans her head towards the shoulder of her lover, in an intense interplay of gazes.