Adonis

Adonis — the beautiful youth beloved of Venus who was killed by a wild boar during a hunt — provided Mannerist painters with a pure male beauty subject analogous to Venus as a subject for female beauty. Cornelis van Haarlem's circa 1620 canvas of Adonis in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, belongs to his later career when he was revisiting mythological nude subjects with a more settled, less urgent technique than his dramatic 1580s-1590s work. Adonis was frequently paired with Venus in compositions showing the goddess's attempts to prevent him from hunting, or shown as a fallen figure attended by the grief-stricken Venus, but a solo Adonis — simply displaying the youth's beauty — was also a valid pictorial type. Cornelis's interest in the male figure as a subject for beauty and formal study ran throughout his career, and Adonis provided a legitimate mythological frame for this investigation of male bodily ideal.

Canvas with smooth nude figure modelling. Cornelis's later style shows less contorted Mannerist figure positions than his 1588-1594 period, settling into a more classical figure treatment that reflects the broader shift in European taste away from extreme Mannerism toward early Baroque naturalism. Flesh modelling is warm and smoothly graduated.