Venus of Urbino
A naked woman reclines on a bed and looks straight at the viewer, while maidservants search in a chest. Titian’s warm, soft colour is typical of Venetian painting.
Compare it with Manet’s Olympia 325 years later – the same pose, an entirely different gaze.
Titian painted the picture in 1538. It was bought by Guidobaldo della Rovere, who soon became Duke of Urbino. In surviving letters he eagerly asks his agent to obtain the painting of “the naked woman”. Whether it was a straightforward commission or a work Titian was already working on is unclear. The original title is not known, and the name Venus of Urbino is later. At the time Titian was the most sought-after painter in Venice and worked for princes all over Europe.
A naked woman lies on a bed with white sheets. She looks straight at the viewer. In her right hand she holds a few roses, and her left rests in her lap. A small dog sleeps at her feet. In the background two maidservants stand by a chest, looking for clothes. A window gives a view of the sky and a tree, and on the windowsill stands a potted myrtle.
The composition is divided by a dark curtain and a vertical line, so that the woman has a dark field of her own behind her. The room behind her, by contrast, is bright and deep. The body forms a long, soft diagonal across the whole picture. This contrast between foreground and background gives the picture both intimacy and depth.
The Venetian school built the picture with colour more than with drawing. Titian painted the skin in warm, translucent layers that glow against the white sheets and the red mattress. The surfaces are softly modelled, and the transitions between light and shadow are almost imperceptible. The dark background behind the body makes the skin look even lighter.
The picture is based on Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, which Titian probably finished himself. But here the woman is awake and indoors. Many scholars interpret the picture as an image of marriage: the chest was a typical wedding chest, the dog stands for fidelity and the myrtle for love. Guidobaldo had married a few years earlier. Others argue that the picture was primarily an erotic image for a private viewer. No interpretation is certain.
The painting was taken to Florence in the 17th century, when Vittoria della Rovere married Ferdinando II de’ Medici. It later came to the Uffizi, where it hangs today. In the 1880s the American writer Mark Twain called it one of the most indecent pictures in the world. There it has been one of the museum’s most talked-about pictures for several hundred years.
The Venus of Urbino became the model for a long line of reclining female nudes in art. Velázquez, Goya and Ingres took up the tradition. Édouard Manet copied the picture when he visited Florence and used it as the starting point for Olympia in 1863, in which the same pose acquired an entirely new and provocative meaning.