Venus and Adonis, or the story of an ancient myth revisited in the Baroque period: all the arts, from painting to poetry, from sculpture to theatre and opera, took possession of it. Is this fable not the ideal model for those who seek to understand and to represent the uneasy discovery of adolescent love, the fearful emotion of first desires, the call of beauty, the fascination for forbidden love that leads, ineluctably, to tragedy? In a world where the painting of human passions became an obsession, this myth allowed artists to explore rare and sublime themes. Imitating the ancients (Ovid, Bion), inspired as they were by Giambattista Marino’s poetic epic on the subject, the moderns were able to find immensely rich source material in this myth. Louis XIV based the decoration of his Trianon on it, Fouquet was offered the idyll by La Fontaine, and in 1697 Paris hosted the opera on the subject by Henry Desmarest and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau.