,TALIAN Renaissance painters and English Renaissance poets knew that Ovid's Venus ardently wooed an Adonis who was more interested in hunting than in love-making. This is how Shakespeare and Titian portray them. But here the resemblance between the greatest and most influential of literary and pictorial versions of the Ovidian myth ends. In Titian's Pardo Venus, in the Louvre, the goddess reposes peacefully in an idyllic forest because her beloved, a young Italian courtier, indulges his love for the noble sport by hunting a gentle stag; and in the version in the Prado Museum, Venus desperately clutches at a handsome Greek athlete because he is forsaking her to hunt the ferocious boar. Veronese, preferring to emphasize the love that Adonis, according to Ovid, did not entirely scorn, features in two paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna a shy lad who lifts the hand of Venus from his thigh, and in the other version, an aggressive youth who fondles her breast. Both Venetians create pastoral settings, reminiscent of the Golden Age, for their paragons of physical beauty, but neither they nor such artists as Sebastiano del Piombo and Cambiaso, who were also attracted to the myth, depict as outrageously comic a couple as Shakespeare in his Venus and AdonisO2 Far from an Arcadian meadow, in the English countryside parched from the sun's purple-coloured face,3 a love-sick Amazon immediately gathers