Being a student of Giovanni Bellini and having been influenced by Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo took from them the softness of forms and lyrical mood, bringing them into his paintings. But while working in Rome, he was also influenced by the art of Raphael with his absolute harmony and Michelangelo, who endowed his characters with unprecedented power.
In the presented canvas the artist turned to the myth of Adonis, the finest young man, Aphrodite’s beloved, killed by a boar while hunting. Del Piombo portrayed the moment when Aphrodite found out about the death of Adonis, which Cupid reports to her, most of which is occupied by deities sitting in a grove, and the dying hero is at a distance. This technique – to take the culmination moment of the whole scene to some distance, to delay its perception by the viewer – sharpens the anxious mood spread in the picture and it runs through the characters in a wave.
In the background, the artist captures a view of Venice from the Doge’s Palazzo and the bell tower of the Cathedral of San Marco, reflected in the calm waters of the lagoon. An evening landscape with a light blue sky, golden sunset, white puffy clouds in the sky and shadows running across the earth and water fill everything depicted by subtle sadness that Venetian artists loved to convey in their paintings.
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