Venus, the classical goddess of Love and Beauty, is aware of her beloved Adonis' mortal destiny and attempts to persuade him not to go hunting.

For Felipe II, Titian painted a series of works known as “Poetry” based on classical texts, mainly Ovid's Metamorphosis. Two of them —Danae (P425) and Venus and Adonis— are in the Prado Museum. Other works in this series include Diana and Acteon, Diana and Calixto (both at the National Gallery in Edinburgh), The Rape of Europe (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) and Perseus and Andromeda (The Wallace Collection, London). Titian himself chose the subject matter for these works, which he called “Poetry” and, beyond symbolic or moral interpretations, they were conceived as paintings to delight the senses.

The “Poetry” paintings appear in the inventories of Madrid's Alcázar Palace beginning in 1623. They entered the Prado Museum collection in 1827.