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Venus y Adonis (Venus and Adonis)

Francisco Goya • circa 1771

Venus y Adonis is one of the most revealing documents of Goya's Italian period — a small, swiftly executed mythological cabinet picture that belongs to a group of commercially motivated works produced during his self-funded sojourn in Italy between 1769 and 1771. Its subject, drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses, gave Goya access to the canonical tradition of European mythological painting at the precise moment when he was encountering that tradition in its fullest expression — in Rome, in the collections of Turin, Bologna, Venice, Parma, and Milan that he documented in his Italian Notebook. The painting is simultaneously a commercial object, an artistic exercise, and a biographical document of one of the most consequential journeys in the history of Spanish art.