SOURCE: Cantelupe, Eugene B. “An Iconographical Interpretation of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Ovidian Comedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 2 (spring 1963): 141-51.

In the following essay, Cantelupe examines the structure and imagery of Venus and Adonis, viewing the work as an Ovidian poem that satirically contrasts Love and Beauty and features a strong moralizing element in its lust motif.

Italian Renaissance painters and English Renaissance poets knew that Ovid's Venus ardently wooed an Adonis who was more interested in hunting than in love-making. This is how Shakespeare and Titian portray them. But here the resemblance between the greatest and most influential of literary and pictorial versions of the Ovidian myth ends.¹

In Titian's Pardo Venus, in the Louvre, the goddess reposes peacefully in an idyllic forest because her beloved, a young Italian courtier, indulges his love for the noble sport by hunting a gentle stag; and in the version in the...