File:Drawing of Pompeii fresco depicting Venus and Adonis by Henri Roux Ainé, 1870.jpg

English: Drawing of Pompeii fresco depicting Venus and Adonis (wounded) by Henri Roux Ainé, 1870. Translated related text: The loves of Venus and Adonis, the death of this young man under the blows of a furious boar, the pain of the goddess, are mythological facts too well known to stop us for a moment. Art and religion had often consecrated this divine mourning: in the temple of Venus Architide, on Mount Lebanon, a statue of the afflicted goddess was adored, from whose eyes it was believed to see tears flowing (i).

The painter from Pompeii represented Adonis dying, stretched out partly on a bench of rocks, partly on the knees of his lover, who stripped herself of her clothes to make a sort of bed for the wounded, and to bandage the cruel wound. whose blood nothing could stop. The face of the goddess, altered by pain, is surrounded by the nimbus, mark of her divinity (2): this symbol, invented by superstitious Egypt, passed from there to the Greeks, and from these to the Romans, who applied it to their deified Caesars; finally the Catholic Church appropriated it, to decorate the images of the saints.

The other characters in this composition are two Genii, one of whom, standing behind Venus, wiping her tears with her hand, appears to be the Genius of the goddess, since he expresses life by holding his torch upright; the other, seated in front, and holding a half-reversed torch, is doubtless the Genius of Adonis. The wounded man himself holds a torch similar to those of the geniuses and composed, as we see in a large number of monuments, of two rods joined together at one end and forming at the other end a pincer capable of retaining some material. inflamed: this overturned torch, which Adonis barely holds with a failing hand, expresses that life is about to leave him: and it is quite wrong that this attribute has been taken for two javelins. Finally, the young hunter's dog is represented on the front of the painting in a worried attitude.

We can reproach the artist for having completely hidden the hands of Venus: perhaps he wanted to express in this way the abandonment and depression of pain; but there is in these two truncated arms something unsightly which this motif hardly excuses.

The vignette represents a chariot of Apollo drawn by two griffins, animals consecrated to the Sun (i), and carrying a lyre, a tripod and a purple drapery which is the palla of the cithareds.