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Artist or Maker: Jacopo Palma, il Giovane (Venice c.1548-1628)

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Provenance: Giovan Battista Marino, by 1636.

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Literature: G.B. Marino, La Galeria del Cavalier Marino, Venice, 1636, p. 15, under 'Favole' as 'Adone, che dorme in grembo di venere di Giacomo Palma'.
G.B. Marino, Lettere, 1966, pp. 102-3, 193, 230.
S.M. Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane, l'opera completa, Milan, 1984, p. 186, under 'lost paintings', listed under those in the Collection of Giovan Battista Marino.

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Notes: In 1619 the great poet Giambattista Marino (Naples 1569-1625) wrote to his editor and friend in Venice, Giovanni Battista Ciotti, that he had commissioned 'three little paintings, two of which are by "signor Palma"' in one of which 'Adonis has died, or is dying, wounded by the boar and Venus cries over him, an amorino close by'. The poet asks that the painter to put in 'some draperies of blue and lake'. Among all the paintings listed by Stefania Mason in her monograph on the artist none corresponds to this subject and it is to be presumed that, although not literally a quadretto, this is the painting that Palma actually painted for Marino. The poet was at the time working on an epic poem of twenty cantos on the tragedy of Adonis, the beautiful young man beloved by Venus but killed by a wild boar as a result of Mars' jealous rage. It was a story that had engaged Palma's great Venetian predecessor, Titian, and this fact combined with the poet's own literary interest in the theme made it a perfect subject for Palma, whose pride in the end result is evident in the large signature inscribed onto the stone at the bottom left.

Palma Giovane, though Venetian and the great-nephew of Palma Vecchio, was trained in central Italy, first in Pesaro (on the Marchigian coastline, an area historically visited by Venetian painters) and then in Rome where his biographer Ridolfi records that he stayed for eight years. He returned to Venice in the late 1570s bringing with him the language of an artist steeped in Mannerism and the antique. He was soon invited to work on prestigious commissions such as the decoration of the Sal del Maggior Consiglio in the Ducal Palace and for a time he worked with Titian, on whose celebrated last Entombment he collaborated. However, Palma's natural language was that of maniera and it was to the exaggerated dramatic poses and the crepuscular lighting of Tintoretto that he was inevitably more strongly drawn. This canvas comes from a date relatively late date in Palma's career and the documentary evidence of Marino's letter written in 1619 is supported by a comparison of the present work to others from late in that decade, most notably the Lot and his Daughters (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence (S. Bernadino, Carpi) in which there is a clear parallel between the modeling of the noble upturned head of the tortured saint and the open-mouthed, dying figure of Adonis. And if the upper part of the composition, with Cupid fluttering above the mourning Venus and the rich swag of red drapery wrapped around the tree, recall Venetian mythologies of the high Renaissance, the sensual intertwining of the two lovers relates to the more erotic visions of the mannerists of central Italy. Venus' body arching over that of Adonis, his arm languidly draped over her left knee, and his right leg receding under hers recall both the paintings of Giulio Romano, so admired by the Venetian poet Pietro Aretino, and the more contemporary nudes of Golzius and Spranger, whose body types the Venus here recalls.

The association of this painting with Giambattista Marino is of particular interest. Marino, though Neapolitan by birth, was the consumate cosmopolitan courtier poet, patronized in turn by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the Duke of Savoy, and Queen Marie de' Medici. Although latterly derided for his own poetic mannerism, dubbed 'Marinismo', Marino was a man of extraordinary erudition. One of his most celebrated poems, La Galleria, a compilation of over 600 verses, each describing a work of art (including this one), seeks to analyze the essence of pictorial genius and was important for its exploration of the relationship of pintura and disegno. Another of his poems, La Strage degli Innocenti, was the inspiration for the paintings of the subject by both Poussin and Guido Reni. The third, Adone, was a purely literary effort but one may presume that there was a relationship between it and the commission of this work. Marino was an exceptional connoisseur of painting, and had a considerable collection of his own. It included the Drowning Leander and the Nereids by Rubens (University Art Gallery, Princeton), a Magdalene by Titian and a now lost portrait of Marino himself by Caravaggio, on whose death he wrote a poetic eulogy. Marino is perhaps best known today for his crucial role in encouraging the young Poussin to travel to Rome where he arranged the young painter's introduction to Marcello Sachetti and, ultimately, to Cassiano del Pozzo, the other great intellectual patron of his day.

We are grateful to Stefania Mason for her assistance in the preparation of this entry.