Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis

Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses (8 CE), composed 2000 years ago, contains a variety of stories on the theme of magical transformations (metamorphoses). One well-known episode recounts how a wild boar kills Adonis, a youth loved by Venus. Distraught, the goddess transforms drops of blood from his wound into scarlet anemone flowers. Benjamin West reimagines the scene as a family tragedy, with Venus’s son Cupid sadly feeling for the pulse in Adonis’s neck.