Anchises major claim to fame in Greek mythology is that he was a mortal lover of the goddess Aphrodite (and in Roman mythology, the lover of Venus). One version is that Aphrodite pretended to be a Phrygian princess and seduced him for nearly two weeks of lovemaking. Anchises learned that his lover was a goddess only nine months later, when she revealed herself and presented him with the infant Aeneas. Aphrodite had warned him that if he boasted of the affair, he would be blasted by the thunderbolt of Zeus. He did and was scorched and/or crippled.
© The Trustees of the British Museum / http://www.britishmuseum.org
Domenicus van Wijnen
Astrologer observing the Equinox and a scene of parting Adonis and Venus (~1680)
This sombre scene, where the only light comes from the candles, the setting sun and the rising moon, is one of the most notoriously obscurely mysterious works. This type of rebus painting was particularly fashionable in the Baroque period, especially among Roman artists. The Dutch painter Dominicus van Wijnen, who assumed the name of Ascanius after moving to Rome and jointing the fraternity of Dutch painters there, painted a large number of complex depictions that pose great demands on the viewer’s erudition. The Wilanów painting, which is an allegory of the natural changes, depicts a young scholar wearing an Oriental turban (an astronomer or an astrologer, possibly a magus) lost in thought over a volume while observing an astronomical phenomenon. The scholar is visited by spectres of mythological lovers, Venus and Adonis. As decreed by Zeus, after Adonis’ tragic death they could only spend half the year together, during spring and summer. Adonis had to spend the remaining time in Hades ruled by its queen Persephone. The clasping couple symbolizes the autumnal equinox, the moment of the lovers’ parting and the coming of autumn and winter, a period of death in the realm of nature. Adonis’ return in spring would be marked by a renaissance, a joyous time of renewed vegetation and natural fecundity. Charon the ferryman of the dead comes from the otherworld to collect Adonis, depicted as a naked and winged man emerging from the waves of the watery main. The two skulls, one human and one animal, are symbolic of the ultimate end of all living creatures. The sculpted decorations of the antique monument bearing a vase and lit by the rising moon likewise allude to the myth of Adonis. The vase probably depicts the moment of the birth (return?) of Adonis, depicted as a small child being helped up by putti (symbolic of emerging from Limbo or the world of the dead. Below, the panel of the sarcophagus depicts a man held (or led?) by two unidentified males of different age, who are probably related to the allegorical meaning of the composition and may be Thanatos and Hypnos or two genii. Both scenes may allude to the ancient feasts of Adonis celebrated in West Asia and on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean (known as the “Adonies” or the “Gardens of Adonis”). In recent scholarship, attention has been drawn to a less well-known of the myth related in Macrobius’ Saturnalia and mentioned early in the 17th century by Karel van Mander in his commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Ascanius may have been familiar with. The pages in the open volume perused by the scholar contain a diagram of constellations corresponding to the autumnal equinox (Libra). This symbol is complemented by the accompanying constellations of Hades or the Ferryman, shown as Charon, and Venus and Adonis. Those constellations could only be seen in the Orient (in the so-called Sphera Barbarica). Thus, it becomes highly likely that the scholar depicted in the painting is one Hipparchus of Nice, an ancient astronomer who lived in Asia Minor.
According to ancient myth, Mars was attracted to Rhea Silvia, a priestess of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, who was also worshipped as the protectress of the family, of hospitality and of ordered community life. Ovid reports that Mars overpowered the Vestal while she was asleep.
Rubens shifted the scene to the temple. The god has been borne there on a cloud and passionately approaches the priestess, who cringes in horror: as a Vestal, she has sworn an oath of chastity, though possibly not of her own free will. Mars has removed his helmet, and with it his war-like aspirations, for the time being. Cupid, the god of love, acts as pimp, and leads Mars to Rhea. Virgil records that Mars had twins by Rhea Silvia, Romulus and Remus, who later founded Rome. Vesta’s eternal fire, tended by the priestess, burns on the altar on the right. As no images with human faces were made of this goddess, her shrine is marked by a statue of Pallas Athena instead.
Rubens demonstrated once more at this point that he was familiar with ancient sources and their contemporary interpretation, as by his friend Justus Lipsius in “De Vesta et Vestalibus Syntagma” (Antwerp, 1605). Rubens borrowed small details from Roman coins and ancient sarcophagi like the one in the Palazzo Mattei in Rome. The fact that the attributes of Mars and Athena are reversed shows that the painting was used as the basis for a tapestry. It is possible that it was intended as the first of a series on Romulus, but by 1625 at the latest, when the scene was taken up for the first time as part of a tapestry for the cycle on the Roman consul Decius Mus, Rubens had clearly abandoned his ideas for an independent series.
Hans Bol, 1859 – Landscape with the Story of Venus and Adonis
Hans Bol painted this unusualin two parts: the central landscape, painted on mounted on wood, and the framing design, painted directly on wood. Both parts tell the story of the beautiful youth Adonis from . In the main panel, and Adonis embrace before he leaves on the hunt shown in the distance, in which he is killed by a boar. Clockwise from left, the frame’s ovals show subsidiary incidents: mother Myrrha commits incest with her father; turned into the myrrh tree as punishment, Myrrha bears their son, Adonis; Venus is struck with love for Adonis; blood springing from the dead Adonis turns into the anemone flower.
In the frame, Bol combined the cartouches and trophies of a three-dimensional picture frame withborders reminiscent of . His materials–opaque color and gold paint on parchment–also follow the tradition of manuscript illumination.