Sotheby’s plans to raise €13.7 million for Titian’s masterpiece
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The masterpiece by Italian painter Titian will be up for auction at Sotheby’s in December, reports The Guardian.
According to the publication, for the work “Venus and Adonis”, written by the artist in the 16th century, it is planned to gain up to 13.7 million euros (12 million pounds). The auction house reports that it is “the most significant work by Titian put up for auction this century.”
Titian’s canvas “Venus and Adonis” depicts a plot from the tenth book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. The painting depicts the goddess Venus in the company of the beautiful youth Adonis, with whom she fell in love after she was wounded by Cupid with his arrow. Adonis is mortally wounded by a boar during a hunt, and the goddess will find her lover bleeding.
This is one of the versions of the painting, written for the Spanish King Philip II. Depictions of the goddess and her mortal lover were considered overly explicit.
Other works by Titian on this subject are in various museums around the world – in the Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery in London, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and others.
The canvas that Sotheby’s will put up for auction belonged, among other things, to the commander Prince Eugene of Savoy and the artist Benjamin West, and it has not been available to the general public for more than two centuries.
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