Venus Discovering the Dead Adonis

Scarsella Ippolito called Scarsellino

(Ferrara c. 1550 - 1620)

This painting is mentioned in the inventory of Scipione Borghese (1620–1630). The myth of the Death of Adonis and that of Diana and Actaeon have similar iconographic details, including dogs, one of Diana’s attributes but also depicted with Adonis and Actaeon during their hunts. What is missing in this work from the typical representation of the tragic end of the story of Adonis, Venus’s beloved, is the wild boar that fatally injures him.

Object details

Commentary

The subject of this painting is drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.525–559): the goddess of love and beauty, struck by the arrows of her son Cupid, falls in love with the hunter Adonis. Her strong feelings for the young man lead her to warn him about the wild animals in the woods where he usually hunts, especially the wild boar, which is in fact the means that the god Mars ends up using to kill him.

Scarsella has depicted the agitated, bewildering, touching moment of Venus’s unexpected discovery of the lifeless body of Adonis, with the goddess held by a nymph while two others express the grief they share with the goddess through their facial expressions and gestures. Above this group of women and to the left, partially hidden among the leaves of a tree, we see two little cupids holding a bow, arrows and a torch, their tools for making people fall in love but also, as in this case, deciding the cruel fate of their targets. The right side of the composition is dominated by a landscape, above which, among the clouds, we see a chariot pulled by two white swans and carrying Venus, who, having heard the anguished cries of her lover, is hurrying down to the forest to find out what has happened. Below, in the foreground, Adonis’s three greyhounds seem to share the pain of the goddess and her handmaidens, gathering near their owner, where an anemone has bloomed, created by Venus from drops of the blood of her beloved hunter. Among these naturalistic details, in particular the sorrow of the dogs and cry of the nymphs, we find another element key for the subject of the painting, drawn from another source: the Epitaphius Adonis, which was written in the second century BCE by Bion of Smyrna, but not published until the fifteenth century (Miarelli Mariani in Immagini degli dei 1996).

The issue of identifying the subject of the work is fundamental, since Scarsellino omitted to portray Adonis’s moral wound in order to maintain the ideals of beauty and decorum championed by Emilian painting at the time, and so the compiler of the Borghese inventory in 1790 described the paintings as ‘Diana and Endymion [by] Scarsellino from Ferrara’.  The painting was described as representing that subject again more recently (Stefani 2000), but this was not accepted by any other scholars.

The painting appears for the first time in the inventory for the Borghese collection dated 1620–1630 as a ‘Adonis killed by the wild boar with Venus and other figures’, with the correct attribution to Scarsellino, a name that was maintained in all the subsequent inventories.

The dating of the painting is instead the subject of debate. Maria Angela Novelli, identifying the painting as a pendant to the Hermaphrodite and Salmacis (inv. 214), dated it to about 1590 in her multiple monographic texts on the artist (1955; 1964; 2008), noting the influence of Venetian painters Titian and Schiavone in the landscape as well as compositional elements that prefigure the work of Annibale Carracci and Francesco Albani. In slight disagreement, Carlo Volpe (1959), expanded the temporal range for the painting to between 1585 and 1595.

The most widely accepted theory is that the painting was made in the early seventeenth century, as proposed by Adolfo Venturi (1893), who dated it to the artist’s late period, in particular for the bluish light of the sky and the cool tones of the landscape. Alessandro Morandotti (1997) similarly dated the painting to about 1600 based on the decorative aspect of the composition. Kristina Hermann Fiore agreed with the latter on the dating (2002). Considering the above, we may insert the Venus Discovering the Dead Adonis immediately after the Christ with his Disciples on the Road to Emmaus (inv. 226) and slightly before the Hermaphrodite and Salmacis (inv. 214), making it plausible that the paintings by Scarsellino in the Borghese collection are chronologically continuous.

The sinuous sensuality of the figures and close attention to the landscape firmly place the painting within the Veneto-Ferrara tradition, prefiguring the grand age of Emilian painting in the seventeenth century (Mariacher 1959; Volpe 1959; Herrmann Fiore 2002).

Lara Scanu