In The Lap of the Gods

Part I

Here she is. Coming live to you from Titian’s easel in 1530s Venice. Venus. The most exotic and famous of all the gods. The divine personification of love, sex, desire, beauty and femininity. She’s laid out before us like the prize leopard in a menagerie. A wanton mix of liquid dynamite poured into a glowing, smooth-skinned sheath. Lurid, shameless and by any level-headed measure pornographic. She’s in on it too. See how she doesn’t look away. Where’s the modest downward glance of a girl caught unawares? Where’s the sense that she’d rather have her clothes on? There isn’t one. She’s been waiting for us. She’s been waiting for . . . it. Kit off. Tits out. Hell, Titian even had tits in his name. Doesn’t get clearer than that. She’s the meat course at a voyeur’s luncheon. The Venus of Urbino. Masterpiece or masturbatory piece? Decency can easily decide.

Did that strike you as a bit over the top? While you read the description, did you look again at the picture of Venus, then frown and say to yourself: she’s not that racy, is she? You probably did. And you’re right to have some doubts. She’s not. At least, not by the standards we’re used to. But for others, in the past, she’s been deeply risqué. Indeed, for some, she’s been so scandalously brassy that they’d have scolded me for not going harder in that opening paragraph. It seems strange that we and our forebears are so far apart. How did it come to be that the same body in the same painting provokes such different reactions? You can probably guess the cultural issues in play here. But just to make sure - before we get to the picture - we’ll have a dig through our relationship with images of the naked female form and how it’s changed over time.

Our best guess is that Homo Sapiens first put on clothes no later than 100,000 years ago during one of the spurts that saw them emerge from the African interior and scramble for a foothold in the areas flanking the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The experts have hit on this rough date because it’s when the human body-louse - which struggles to survive outside clothing – appeared on the scene after diverging from its head-louse parentage. 100,000 years is a span so vast that most of us struggle to comprehend it in any meaningful way. It’s a bracket that can accommodate 5,000 human generations. Consider that a mere 120 would take us back to Socrates, 230 to the earliest pyramids and 450 to the first traces of agriculture. 5,000? There’s no relatable marker we can put down against that. All we can say is it takes us into the furthest depths of prehistory during the Late Pleistocene period, when an ice age was still underway. This unimaginably distant province is the place where Adam and Eve first pulled on their underwear and left nudity behind. Make no mistake, we have been dressing ourselves for an awfully long time.

Once the clothes were on, the uncovered body inevitably came to be associated with all manner of taboos. Because of this, it was remarkably tricky for us to ogle naked strangers whenever the fancy took hold. At least, in those cooler parts of the world where covering up was normal. Sure, there were exceptions. The Greeks loved to strip. Men would exercise naked in Athens. In Sparta they were joined – we think - by the women. But for the rest, the game changed forever on the day that slightly differentiated louse waved a cheery goodbye to its parents and left its home on the scalp for a new one beside an armpit. We had officially become the only species which covers itself up as a matter of routine. The naked body of Homo Sapiens was henceforth special territory reserved for special occasions.

This is why realistic representations of the nude female figure have always been so electrifying. They reveal a view which for a hundred millennia we believed should be hidden. Yet at the same time, we’ve always had a need to unveil the veiled. The earliest evidence we have of people doing this has come down to us in the form of what we call Venus figurines. One of the best examples of these is The Venus of Willendorf, which is very loosely dated to 25 or 30,000 years ago. This small stone sculpture of a tremendously curvy, faceless, naked woman was perhaps ritualistic. We don’t know for sure. There is a strong sense, however, that a great deal of physical desire was present in the hand that shaped her prolific breasts, her hips and her undercarriage. These features are exaggerated. But great effort and patience was deployed in making them as naturalistic and persuasive as possible. It’s hard not to give rein to a flight of absurdity here, and imagine a Palaeolithic sculptor head-banging to a chorus of Fat Bottomed Girls as he carved. Yet in spite of being - for many, no doubt - a treat for the eyes, we have no evidence that feminine nudes such as this were widespread.

The same is true as we get into recorded history. Even a people like the Greeks, whose love affair with the human body is known to us all, were sluggish when it came to naked ladies. They’d been sculpting the unclothed male for centuries before Praxiteles chanced his hand at Aphrodite reaching for a towel after her bath. With the Renaissance, more effort – as we shall see - was put in by painters like Titian. And in the eras that followed, a tradition of the nude did indeed establish itself as artists, fired up by the rediscovery of the classical world, looked to the ancient goddesses of Olympus for their inspiration. Yet still no one could claim that au-naturel depictions were commonplace in the daily rounds of human existence.

So it remained until, almost out of nowhere, female nudity came roaring to life in 1953 when Hugh Hefner started Playboy magazine. The understanding Hefner presented of the female body was fully sexualised. There were no allusions to divine feminine entities to save the blushes of the high-minded. This was porn. Naturally, there had been porn before. Everyone has heard of Pompeii and Parisian postcards. There had also been short-lived Victorian magazines and US calendars. But none of these had the cultural leverage which Playboy began to accrue in the 50s. 4,997 generations after the louse went south, the clothes were off again for anyone who cared to look. Porn spread its wings, took flight and was soon landing on magazine stands, in desks, under mattresses and even in playgrounds. Nowhere was immune.

These days porn is never more than a click or two away. We’re told the average child will have encountered it by the age of 13. Or 11. Or 8. Maybe that first glimpse will be as vanilla as Hefner’s original offerings now seem. More likely it’ll come with thrusters set to maximum. In either case, we live at a time when provocative naked bodies are available on tap. There are some jaw-dropping statistics which reveal just how avidly we seek them out. In 2019, on Pornhub, the largest of the free adult sites, 16 million hours of content were watched every day in the course of 115 million visits. You might subscribe to the cliché that it’s just shifty blokes with an overabundance of hormones and an aversion to eye-contact who enjoy slopping around in a soup of X-rated material. Think again. Almost a third of those visits were made by women, who, by the way, were 100% more likely to use search terms like hardcore, gangbang or rough sex than guys. Didn’t expect that, did you?

Whatever tastes people have, the big takeaway from these stats is that even if we exclude every adult site but the largest, we, as a species, spend 625,000 years staring at the naked bodies of strangers every 12 months. That’s 45 minutes for every man, woman and child on the planet. If we were to account for the clips viewed on other free sites, subscription sites, material that is stored offline and also make allowance for the quaint habits of those who prefer stills to movies, the number might be three or four times as much. Maybe more. But perhaps these figures are too big to resonate meaningfully. Let’s instead concentrate on a single day’s consumption. If we were to take all the minutes of content watched on Pornhub just yesterday, lay them into a contiguous thread stretching backwards through time, then walk its length, when we disembarked, we would find ourselves arriving just at that moment where a fresh-faced Emperor Constantine wades into a civil war at the start of his reign. If we didn’t want to hang around for the bloodshed, and hastily returned to our time ladder to carry on via all the other adult content consumed yesterday, we would re-emerge from the 24 hour porn matrix somewhere between the Bronze Age and God knows where in the Palaeolithic period. A single day’s viewing fills that much time. It’s gobsmacking.

Trends like these - no matter how privately they’re indulged - can’t but have an effect on wider attitudes. And they do. There are specific body types that predominate in porn, which have seeped into popular culture as ideals of desirability. It’s not just the exploding pneumatic curves of the puffed, buffed and hyper-modified Barbie. It’s also the trim and toned. In 2013, a research project was carried out across a database of 10,000 adult actresses, which found the average performer was a slim 5’5” brunette with a B-cup. On reality TV and social media we see countless people attempting to reconfigure themselves into something that approximates these body types. Implicit in their efforts is a new notion of Venus; an ideal of female beauty and eroticism that isn’t just informed by porn, but also – with the right gym membership and perhaps surgeon – obtainable. Consider the contentious Protein World advert on the London underground in 2015. The statuesque Aussie model Renee Somerfield stared out at commuters in front of the printed question ‘Are you beach body ready?’ Renee had a flawless, svelte, hourglass figure with hips, tummy, hair and boobs that could easily push the needle into the red on the Scoville scale; a perfected distillation of the phenotypes porn aspires to. She was definitely ready for the beach. And with the right protein shakes, she seemed to promise that every other woman could be too. The contemporary Venus, who dances each day through thousands of years’ worth of human imagination, needn’t be a stranger. She can be your neighbour. She can be you.

For our ancestors, the attractiveness Venus symbolised was a faraway aspiration. It was understood as an impossibility, a signpost to a place no human could go, even if they could take a few steps along the path. Nowadays, that’s changed. The female form can be reshaped and sculpted in ways that were never before possible with makeup, whalebone scaffolding and clothes. Mortals feel that distant ideal - such as it’s understood - is within their grasp. Many go for it. They attend their gym as previous generations did their church, and reconfigure their limbs, torsos and backsides. What will-power can’t achieve, cash can. Faces can be changed, noses remodelled, lips expanded, eyes opened up and cheeks adjusted. Asses can be slimmed, lifted and enlarged. Breasts are refitted, rezoned, replaced and given a prominence never seen in the modest dreams of the past. Flab is sucked away, tummies are flattened, wrinkles and blemishes disappear, while inked markings take their place, hinting at primal energies beneath the skin. Then there’s the final touch: 500 billion dollars (rising rapidly) spent every 12 months on the creams, powders, tints and colours that finish the job. These are the first children of history who can shape shift. Most of them will say they do it for the sake of their wellbeing. No doubt there’s some truth to the claim. But it’s also clear that for many that sanitary requirement is synonymous with a loud tableau of turbo-charged eroticism. To be sure, they’re not all around us in our everyday lives. This is not a majority by any stretch. But in our recently found digital lives, the new Venus is everywhere.

Many become obsessed with their transformation. We can tell because they transmit it to the world through the eye of their phone, pouting as they pose before the clicking mirror of Narcissus. A vast audience ticks and likes, feeding the spiralling cycle. Those who don’t tick nonetheless see. Beneath it all, a new, more graphic and explicit understanding of sexuality and the female body churns like the magma within a volcano. This is 21st century porn’s gift to the world: one where the powerful connections and dizzying thrills found in spoken words, brief looks and brushing fingers are demolished and replaced with the naked body at its most carnal and extreme. Even if we manage to evade the headwaters where these new currents are bubbling up, the effects are unavoidable further downstream. Intensely amped up sexiness feeds into reality TV, the cosmetics industry, magazines, drama, media, the music industry, online dating, clothing, dieting, fitness, everything that come with a ‘celebrity’ tag and much else besides. The contemporary Venus has changed the way we see. At least, for now. But she hasn’t done it on her own. She’s had some help from another quarter.

Nothing’s done more to change the relationship between our collective imagination and the visual world than the camera. Since it came along, we’ve lived in an environment that is extraordinarily image heavy. Compared to how things were before its arrival, the difference is night and day. Once they stepped outside their church, the average person of Titian’s era could go about their business for days without seeing a realistic representational image. Weeks if they lived in a rural area. Today, we drown under the weight  of the stuff. To escape, you’d have to lock yourself in a cupboard, and – altogether more improbable – turn off your phone. With a growing torrent of imagery flooding our lives, it was entirely logical some of it would be fashioned to pound into our visual cortex like a battering ram and smash open our dopamine reservoirs. Add to that the relaxed boundaries ushered in by an age of permissiveness, and it was inevitable we’d end up saturated with high-octane representations of female sexuality. This, then, is where we are. It’s why, for most, a sixteenth century nude such as the Venus of Urbino looks tame, plain and harmless. She’s an elegant horse-drawn carriage clip-clopping along a Formula 1 track while McLarens and Ferraris roar past. For better or worse, our taste buds are used to racier fare.

If we go back a little, we find that people generally had more sensitive palettes. They could detect traces of the erotic in places where many of us would draw a blank. But that’s not to say they had a problem with nudity. They weren’t quite the prudes we tend to imagine, gasping at the sight of an exposed ankle. They were just more tuned in to the powerful effect a bared body could have. Of course, it was generally easier for everyone if artists hell-bent on painting breasts and backsides fitted them into a context which pointed to higher-minded concerns than those that congregate around the waist. A touch of history, mythology or religion could go a long way in settling things down. Including a Scythian style bow and a quiver of arrows could work wonders on this front. A putto – the puffy child-angel that features in so much art – was similarly effective. A background that wasn’t of the painter’s time was also good. One that hinted at the classical world or the heavens was usually a safe bet.

Boucher, a prominent painter of the mid 1700s, would regularly drop these signals across his canvases. If we look at his Heracles and Omphale, we find putti, a classical setting, and a glimpse of a quiver of arrows hanging at the hip of the putto on the right. Ta-da! A painting which even for modern eyes is lurid  - with its French kissing, tangled limbs and groped flesh – collects a get out of jail free card. There were other tricks too. Ensuring that your nude didn’t look out of the picture directly at the viewer was generally a sound policy. Offering eye contact while in a situation of undress was the sort of depraved behaviour that ought to stay in the bordellos where it doubtless started. Further down, the feminine mound was best if covered with drapery. If - due to some inexplicable lapse in judgement - this was not possible, it was compulsory that it at least be kept devoid of undergrowth. At the same time, and for obvious reasons, revealing too much of the valley in which that undergrowth was forbidden was also forbidden.

When we consider this convention of camouflaging the realities of the female anatomy, it’s hard not to think of the story of John Ruskin, the celebrated Victorian art critic. In 1854, the marriage he had with his young wife, Effie Gray, was annulled on grounds of non-consummation. In a statement to his lawyer, Ruskin hinted darkly there was something about her body that repulsed him and deadened his desire. It’s hard to make sense of the claim. Effie was undoubtedly pretty and had a long second marriage and children with the painter John Everett Millais. No ogre was hiding under those petticoats. What on Earth could have given Ruskin such a turn? Some argue the man was so drenched in the art he loved he assumed a smooth, featureless canyon was standard between the legs of all women. When the moment of truth came with Effie, he was shocked by what he encountered. Any matrimonial deeds were out of the question. Forever, as it turned out; Ruskin is not believed to have slept with anyone afterwards.

Perhaps there’s some truth to the story. More likely something else was going on. But what ought to grab our attention is the insight that someone in the 1800s could spend decades looking at the nudes of ancient Athens, Victorian Britain and everywhere in between without ever catching sight of a pubic hair. Nor, for that matter, anything else which might hint at the intimate nooks of feminine anatomy. There were unspoken rules that dictated the presentation of the naked female form. For centuries, they had governed art. Everyone, from Rome to Paris to London, wordlessly understood them. By all means, paint a piece that celebrates the beauty of the body. Improve on it, if you can. Eroticism? Yes, well, a little, if you must. But mind how you go, dress it up right, and don’t turn it into a strip show. Above all, no biology lessons.

The consequences for those who broke the rules could be alarming. In 1808, when a borderline effort by the painter Goya was discovered in the private collection of the Spanish prime minister, the Inquisition got involved. The Nude Maja, as she is known, is lit so that her form gleams against a dark background. The unusually supple, rolling curves of her outline have obviously been engineered to prod the viewer into a carnivorous frame of mind. She unwinds on a chaise longue over which some frilly-edged pillows and a sheet have been thrown. Her hair is loose and her arms are behind her head as she lies back after an evening romp that’s left her with a languid smile. This is steamy stuff. Yet not so bad that a scattering of archery equipment or, better yet, a child-angel buzzing overhead like a drone wouldn’t have offered some reassurance. Neither of these, however, could sanitise what happens further down her body. Here, the hound slips the leash. The Maja’s torso twists towards the viewer, and plain as day, for all to see, right at the horizontal centre point of the canvas, a whisper of fuzz creeps up her pelvis. To top it off, she brazenly stares out at us, her cheeks still flushed from whatever it is that makes a woman’s cheeks flush. For right-thinking Spaniards, these added features had the same galvanising effect as a shark’s fin breaking water by a busy beach. Goya was always going to be in trouble once the guardians of public morality got an eyeful. In the end, when he was brought before the investigating tribunal, he managed to wriggle off the hook by pointing out similarities (tenuous ones, it has to be said) between his piece and a national treasure, the Rokeby Venus by Velasquez. Even so, the Nude Maja was confiscated by the inquisition.

Things were usually more laid back in France. Boucher – who we mentioned above – and many others dabbled in erotic nudes that trod close to the edge of acceptability without much by way of  repercussion. That did not mean, however, that artists had carte blanche. In the 1850s, Ingres was a painter of enormous stature and repute. As he came into his twilight years, the bulk of the French establishment was falling over itself to embrace him. Yet even he could encounter a chilly reception if he pushed things too far. In his seventies, he completed a painting of a bath house filled with two dozen naked ladies of a Turkish harem. On the face of it, he stuck to the guidelines. No eye contact, no short and curlies, and an exotic setting completely unrelated to 19th century France. But the cascade of flesh, the provocative and suggestive poses, the heavy-lidded eyes, the hints of opium and abandonment to sensual pleasure, when taken all together, were more than contemporary society could accommodate. In theory, Ingres had painted right up to the edge of the line. In truth, he’d gone well past it. The picture’s first buyer – Napoleon’s nephew, Prince Jerome Bonaparte - had to sheepishly return the piece to Ingres after his wife damned it with the single adjective ‘improper’. Even in the decades afterwards, The Turkish Bath was twice declined by the Louvre for their collection, and only made the cut at the third time of asking in 1911.

Although an over enthusiastic approach to the nude could get giants like Goya and Ingres into trouble, that didn’t put off lesser-known artists who were just as keen to commit their brushes to the bare-bodied cause. The majority played within the white lines marking the boundary of the pitch. The draperies were suitably located; the mythology was present and accounted for; if there wasn’t a bow or a quiver of arrows, there was a putto. Most knew what they were up to. And so, with the correct boxes ticked, the game was still on. By the 1860s, the annual Salon exhibition in Paris  - which showcased the talents of the best in front of a large public audience – was awash in nudes. Venus, understandably, was the personality deployed most often. A marvellous cartoon from 1864 by the satirically minded artist, Daumier, sums the situation up. Two ladies are in retreat from the Salon walls where some broad-hipped figures lounge and stretch. ‘More Venuses this year,’ says one with an exasperated look, then carries on, ‘It’s always Venus . . . as if any woman ever looked like that!’ A chunk of the audience may have found her irritating, but the naked goddess was very much in the ascendant. She was, in her way, as aesthetically influential as her distant cousin in porn is today.

Because the art-going public of the mid to late 1800s was better acquainted with images of Venus than any generation before, it’s a surprise to find it was at this time that Titian’s Venus of Urbino ran up against her strongest criticism. In 1880, after seeing her during a visit to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (where she still resides) Mark Twain wrote: ‘there, against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses – Titian’s Venus.’ Twain had a superb knack for canny observation. He could also be very funny. He’s probably the only person who can turn an essay on the technicalities of German grammar into a laugh-out-loud ride. There’s no doubt he aimed his shots at this ‘obscenest of pictures’ with as much of a smirk as a frown. Nonetheless, he did have some gripes with great art more generally. We need to grasp these if we’re going to make sense of why he said what he did.

Twain’s chief grumble – one that re-occurs across his accounts of travelling in Europe -  was that a lot of famous art had been puffed up and inflated by the talk of earnest connoisseurs. The veneration they offered was absurd. Half the time, they couldn’t even agree on what they were looking at. Nonetheless, if an unremarkable anonymous painting were to magically sprout an old-master attribution, these people would trip over themselves in a race to kiss it. Tour-guides were no better. Twain viewed them as the droning representatives of a cultural-industrial complex. They swarmed like bluebottles around Europe’s artistic artefacts, heaving their exaggerated, deadweight opinions onto everyone unlucky enough to be within earshot. A mind furnished with some common sense couldn’t help but turn hostile towards all the hogwash. By way of illustration, at one point on his travels, Twain became so fed up with the sheer volume of preposterous claims made on behalf of Michelangelo’s greatness that he found all he could give thanks for was the fact the man was dead. It wasn’t the artists or their artworks that irked him – they were merely over-rated. It was their bloviating champions who took the biscuit. Twain was an unaffected man of America and the New World. There was no harm and much fun to be had in taking a pin to this bubble of pretension. What could be better than pointing out to the flunkies, bores and windbags that right under their noses one of the shiniest jewels in their casket was flaunting herself like a slut. The Venus of Urbino became the unfortunate collateral damage in a bombing mission.

Twain first used her as a foil. He started by pointing out a double standard. He noted how the current generation were so buttoned up they preferred to have the genitalia of the unimportant statues that stood outside the Uffizi covered over with fig leaves, even though weather and time had worn away any semblance of human anatomy. Once inside the great museum, however, the same people rushed to Titian’s Venus to gloat and gaze at a picture of a woman which was, as Twain framed it, scandalous. How is it, he hummed innocently to himself, that the art which makes it into galleries, no matter how indecent, is given a free pass, while artworks outside are never granted the same license? He then explained that there would be uproar if he attempted to portray in written words the task Venus busies herself with in the painting. Anyone could come and gawp at the picture, but God forbid Twain should describe it. What was this activity he wanted to rub into the noses of the bombastic aficionados he’d tired of during his European travels? What was it about Venus that was so foul, vile and obscene; that was too much for the wall of a brothel; that was, as he concluded wryly, ‘too strong for any place but a public Art Gallery’? Here’s a quote from a contemporary of Twain’s, the English poet and essayist Algernon Charles Swinburne. He saw the Venus of Urbino in 1864 and wrote of it afterwards in a letter to a friend. It clears things up.

“As for Titian’s Venus – Sappho and Anactoria in one – four lazy fingers buried dans les fleurs de son jardin – how any creature can be decently virtuous within thirty square miles of it passes my comprehension.”

Buried in - not resting on - the flowers of her garden. Those four lazy digits were up to no good.

Or were they? How can we be so sure that Venus is caressing herself? Might it be that she’s simply lying back with her fingers in the curled position that is normal for all of us when we relax? Perhaps there something symbolic going on instead; something esoteric which isn’t obvious to the casual onlooker. Over the years, a great many art historians have hummed and hawed over these questions. The majority have sided with Twain and decided that what you see is what you get: the girl on the canvas is an erotic fantasy with little to excuse her behaviour. A second faction have dug into the medical literature of the time and concluded she’s an instruction manual on how a young bride can encourage a pregnancy. But neither group has properly tried to understand the painting through the lens of other pictures. And there’s a small cluster of these that go a long way in uncovering the artist’s intentions. Once we’ve had a good look at them and the bizarre book that inspired the earliest, we’ll arrive at an understanding of The Venus of Urbino that’s a good deal more substantial than what’s been put out there so far.

Before we set off on our own journey, however, we ought to retrace the steps of some of those scholars who trod the road before us. More so than most painters, Titian is a hot property in art history. His work has been dissected and explored by some first class minds. If we charge into the debate unaware of the territory they’ve mapped, we won’t be able to stand over the conclusions we draw. Worse, we’ll miss out on some entertaining insights into his life and surroundings. So don’t feel down. This won’t be a slog. There are some colourful tidbits on the way.

We may as well start with the most widespread view; the one which would have us believe The Venus of Urbino is a posh, provocative pinup and no more. Sure, the young woman on the canvas has been made magnificent by Titian’s superpowers as a painter and his unfailing visual know-how. But there’s a letter that survives from the picture’s first owner in which he briefly speaks of the piece. He doesn’t mention ‘Venus’ at all. Instead, the figure’s referred to simply as ‘the naked woman’. It’s also worth pointing out that the model Titian used was a well known Venetian courtesan who had earned the admiration of some seasoned Lotharios. Put these two snippets of information together and there can be no doubt what was on the artist’s mind while he painted. It was 16th century art critics 30 years later who decided that an obviously titillating nude was instead a classical deity. They wrongly christened her Venus, muddling her identity for the generations that followed. But if we ignore their mistake, the picture is easily understood. There’s no mystery, no hidden layer, no excuse. She’s a centrefold. For 150 years, the majority of informed voices have assembled behind this banner. Taking our cue from their claims, we’ll call them the ‘Pinups’.

The Pinups’ theory has much circumstantial evidence in its favour, the most persuasive bit being that hand between the thighs. Once you spot it, it becomes difficult to give Titian the benefit of the doubt. In fact, if you know a little about the artistic conventions which governed the handling of the naked female form beforehand, it’s practically impossible to cut him any slack. We have to remember that Renaissance painters like Titian were the inheritors of an aesthetic tradition that stretched back 2000 years. Most of them were happiest when rummaging around for their inspiration in the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, it was during this epoch that one of the best known realistic representations of a naked woman appeared, when, in the 4th century BC, Praxiteles sculpted his Venus (or Aphrodite, if you prefer your Gods in their Greek skin). Copies and drawings of this statue and others like it were common in 1500s Venice, where artists studied and aped them. And they always went to great lengths to present the female nude in a particular way so as to keep things modest. But Titian deliberately broke with this convention. We ought to make a quick diversion into the ancient world to find out exactly what he was departing from.

For all of the gifts it passed on to us, Hellenic culture was never a winner when it came to women. A form of purdah was the norm. It’s generally believed that in order to appear respectable, the women of ancient Athens had to cover their skin almost entirely, as if they were Carmelite nuns. The rules may have been more relaxed inside the household. But there’s no doubt feminine modesty was hardwired into the general culture. In a world like this, sculpting the female form, even a goddess’s, required tact. Praxiteles skipped round the obstacle course of social sensibilities by inventing a pose for his nude that would - if not satisfy - at least mollify the pearl-clutching prudes. We call it the ‘Venus Pudica’, where pudica means bashful or chaste. It’s an easily recognised pose. Venus positions a hand to shield her happy valley from any drooling voyeur’s gaze. She might be naked, but she makes it clear her romantic areas are off limits. Once Praxiteles hit upon the formula, other sculptors took the idea and ran with it. In fact, if we do a quick headcount, we find roughly fifty female nudes survive from antiquity where breasts and clefts are screened  discreetly, many of which Venetian artists like Titian knew well.

Although there’s a good deal of variety from one Venus Pudica to the next, the way they signal their modesty generally falls into two categories. The first group tend to wrap their waist with a drape of some kind, holding it close over their loins. The second set place their hand across their mound with their digits outstretched to maximise the area blocked from view. There are occasional examples where the fingers curl towards the crotch – Praxiteles original sculpture is one such. But when this happens, the hand is kept a small distance clear of the body to reassure us there’s no funny business going on.

With the classical world exerting such a hefty influence over the artists of the Renaissance, it’s no surprise to see these conventions repeated in the art of 15th and 16th century Italy. We can spot the pudica pose in Masaccio’s fresco of a grief-stricken Eve departing the garden of Eden. We also find it in a couple of Botticelli’s works, including his famous painting of Venus arising from the ocean. More importantly, we come across it in a picture of Titian’s which depicts an alarming swarm of putti worshiping before a statue of Venus, where the goddess has covered her pelvis with a drape. This was painted some years before the Venus of Urbino. It’s a crystal clear indication Titian, like Botticelli and Masaccio before him, understood exactly how the game should be played. He knew perfectly well that curly-fingered hands could only touch the loins if some fabric was present. Otherwise, they had to be at least a few inches clear of the flowerbed. The fact he chose to break the rules in the way he did shows us he wished to shake things up. He wanted to lead his audience into a simmering soup of innuendo. And just in case there was any doubt about it, look at what he did with the model’s eyes. Are they downcast and shy? Do they stare demurely off to one side? No. They lock with ours. We are made complicit in what she’s up to. We are – Lord have mercy -practically a participant in the depraved act taking place before us.

If you struggle to imagine a leading light of the Renaissance, such as Titian, snuffling around for kicks like a truffle pig, consider the company he kept. Consider Pietro Aretino. A great deal of what we know about Titian’s character and personal life comes to us via the correspondence of this staggeringly colourful chap. The existence Pietro led would handily fill a ten hour box-set. He was a high class chatter-monger and blackmailer, a comic, a libertine, an art critic, a polemicist, a pamphleteer, a poet and a playwright. He was the world’s first fulltime gossip columnist. The fruits of all Europe’s whispering grapevines fell at his feet. More often than not, he put about each gobbet of scandal as soon as he heard it. No one flew below the radar. Aristocrats, prelates, popes, kings and even emperors had to watch as their beans were spilled in public. Before long, Pietro was known as the ‘Scourge of Princes’. Inevitably, his antics had consequences. He was turfed out of cities, threatened, chased, stabbed in the chest and on one occasion lost two fingers to an assassin who ambushed him while he returned home late from a party one night. Yet for every high placed enemy he made, there was a corresponding friend whose patronage would keep the man – often in some style – safe from prison or death.

Provided you were on the right side of Pietro, his magnetism and good company were legendary. When he chose, he could be an irresistibly smooth flatterer. Hardly anyone who experienced one of his charm offensives was able to stand firm. He mixed in the highest circles, and the stream of visitors in and out of his home was enough for the house to be mistaken for a busy tavern, albeit one where the food was excellent and the clientele was international. He was very much in his element under frescoed ceilings in palaces, but complained of feeling out of sorts if he was too long away from the brothels he loved. Good looking youths were the staple in his voracious sexual diet. But girls were consumed with as much gusto whenever they were available. He wrote in a letter on one occasion that he would worry for his health if he didn’t have forty lovers a month. In another, he announced that a long life could be ensured only by indulging the animal passions as often as possible. He heaped up fortunes through blackmail and favours, spent them, then amassed new ones. Famously, he handed out cash to the poor and needy at a rate his pockets couldn’t always sustain. In the same vein, he harboured an ambition – as surprising as it was hilarious – of one day being made a cardinal. Even his death was colourful. Instead of falling prey to the daggers or diseases his lifestyle invited, he fell off a chair during a fit of uncontrollable laughter and smacked his skull, dying a short time later. He was a fizzing firecracker of entertainment and intrigue, as infuriating as he was fun. He was also the closest and dearest friend Titian ever had.

Pietro arrived in Venice in 1527. By the time Titian was painting the Venus of Urbino – 5 to 10 years later - the two men were as close as brothers, with Pietro declaring, ‘I am he and he is I.’ Along with a third chap – the Florentine architect Jacopo Sansovino – they made up a group known about the town as the ‘Triumvirate of Taste’. Whether at home or out on social manoeuvres, they drank, ate, talked and laughed together. They also partied together. While Jacopo and Pietro made free with the dozen or so women that were permanently rotating through the latter’s house, Titian, we are told, held back. He would joke and flirt and kiss. But as far as the heavier stuff was concerned, he would go no further than seating a girl on his knee.

This claim, which was made by Pietro, has an appeal for those who disagree with the Pinup’s salty explanation of the Venus of Urbino. It seems to be testimony that Titian was an elevated soul uninterested in the kind of casual carnality the Pinups ascribe to him and his famous painting. Bear in mind that à la carte romances were a given in Venice, even for husbands. (Titian married at least once and quite likely twice). The city was notoriously laid back about vice and was famous for hordes of courtesans and prostitutes like those with whom Pietro shared his home. They were a spirited, glamorous bunch, many of whom strutted about bare-breasted on high platform shoes with their hair bleached blonde by a mixture of sunshine, piss and lemon juice. It was generally accepted that the married men of Venice would get to know them as well as possible from time to time. Yet Titian appears to have resisted the urge. Perhaps he was a straightforward soul determined to keep faith with his wife. Perhaps he lacked the erotic bravery to push those late night carousals to their logical conclusion. In any case, it’s clear the man could pass long rowdy nights surrounded by lechery, only to walk away untouched by it all. This surely makes it possible that he painted The Venus of Urbino all the while blind to the innuendo others have since found in it.

Yet this is unlikely. In another letter, Pietro wrote that Titian happily admitted he could find something lascivious in the face of every woman he met. Not only does the remark reveal a frisky eye for the ladies, it also makes the character sketch of a kindly, knee-sitting, Father Christmas type seem a mite farfetched. It’s more likely that Pietro span a tale of abstinence because he had become Titian’s sales agent – a very good one as it turned out – and was anxious to keep his friend’s reputation squeaky clean. We should also bear in mind there were unconfirmed whispers of Titian sleeping with the models he chose for his paintings. These women were usually experienced courtesans. Even if the rumours were exaggerated and they merely posed, it’d nonetheless be difficult to keep their company day in day out and remain oblivious to the kind of things which might come across as suggestive. If that wasn’t enough of a window into the man’s mind, one must also consider that Titian’s closest companion was not just a fiend for whom a daily collision between the bedposts was a compulsive necessity, he was a pornographer too.

Pietro had fled Rome after getting into trouble with the authorities for obscenity. He had written the lurid text that accompanied a series of highly graphic erotic prints which he and some others published as a booklet called I Modi (The Ways). This was a glossary of sixteen illustrated positions for amorous couples. But not in the Kama Sutra mode of a gentle spirited life lesson; I Modi was altogether more gratuitous. When it came out, the papacy’s collective jaw dropped in appalled astonishment. Every copy that could be found was hastily gathered up and destroyed – only a few fragments survive in the British Museum. It didn’t stop there. Pietro also wrote a series of dialogues which included a vignette where lust-crazed nuns had basketfuls of glass dildos delivered to them in their convent and made whoopee with gangs of free-wheeling friars. This was a man whose life creaked under the weight of his erotic interests. If Titian couldn’t spot the suggestiveness of his Venus, we can bet every penny his friend could. The entertaining and scurrilous Pietro would have whistled at those seductive outlines the moment they appeared on the canvas. There is, therefore, no scenario in which Titian could’ve failed to apprehend the nature of the image he was crafting. But perhaps the strongest argument to be made for a deliberately hot nude has less to do with considerations of character and company. It rests instead on the identity of the patron for whom the painting was intended. For centuries this was thought to be Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, who paid Titian for the finished picture and took it home, where over time it absorbed some of his title. But more recently - thanks to the research Sheila Hale carried out for her superb 2012 biography of Titian - we believe the painting was destined for someone else at first: a 21 year old tearaway called Ippolito de Medici.

Everyone has heard of the Medici family. Usually we associate them with Florence, where they were kings in all but name, doling out the cash and patronage that nurtured the greatest talents of the Renaissance. But the truth is they had influence wherever there was power in 16th century Italy. In spite of the jostling, assassinations and malfunctioning alliances that dogged most of the great Italian dynasties, they had a knack for remaining at - or close to - the top of the heap. Ippolito was very much a beneficiary of his family’s prestige, albeit a reluctant one. Even though he had zero interest in holy orders, he was made a cardinal at the age of 18 by his cousin, the pope, who had helped to bring the youth up since his father’s death 13 years previously. This was not a position that Ippolito wanted. In fact, it left him so nonplussed it seems he never bothered to get himself ordained. Instead, he passed much of his time trying to wriggle free of the post. But the politics were set.  The pope wanted a close family member as one of his top men. Ippolito had to play the game. In return, he had an office that came with serious clout, and a direct line to the ear of the supreme pontiff himself. So, when he sauntered into Venice for a couple of weeks in 1532, it was a golden chance for Titian, who was desperate to secure a decent church career for his older son, Pomponio. In quick order, an agreement on a pair of portraits of Ippolito was arranged, probably via Pietro, who had known the swaggering youth for a few years. But to make sure of his favour, a cherry would be required on top. If the idea didn’t occur to Titian, it certainly would have struck Pietro that a third more special painting would be just the thing to win the restless young man over.

Upon his arrival in town, Ippolito promptly took up the company of a courtesan called Angela del Moro, known to all by the epithet la Zaffetta – the little policewoman. (For the sake of propriety, it’s worth pointing out the bubbly, stripperesque nickname was probably due to her father being a Venetian form of cop, a zaffo. It was not on account of any specialist activity she offered. Although it’s unlikely to have been lost on anyone that the word zaffetta could also double up to mean the little plughole.) The get-together between cardinal and courtesan, which was likely arranged by Pietro, was a terrific success. When a liaison with her overran, making him late for a meeting with the Doge of Venice, Ippolito preferred to leave the de facto ruler of the city drumming his fingers in his palace rather than finish up too hastily with his new squeeze. This may in part be down to the youth’s brattish bad manners. But we also have to allow for the fact that Angela was no ordinary working girl.

Estimates of the number of prostitutes and courtesans available for hire in Venice vary between 10 and 20,000. Only one charged more than la Zaffetta. And it’s not as if the competition was made up of wheezing second raters. Venetian Jezebels were sorted into what was effectively a ranking system of the best and the rest. The names, rates and details of the top 200 women were listed in a small, punters’ guide which went by the snappy title The Catalogue of all the Principal and Most Honoured Courtesans. Those who made the cut were considered the cream of Europe. It wasn’t just locals who thought so. There was a churning mass of international visitors who thronged to the great city of trade for pleasure as much as for commerce or politics. We can tell how much they succumbed to the night life from the taxes paid to the state by the girls they hired. This was a colossal sum; enough to fund a dozen warships. To stand apart from such intense competition required something exceptional.

It’s important to explain a little of what set a courtesan apart from a prostitute. Imagining them to be no more than pricier, better looking versions of less fortunate street girls doesn’t do them justice. First of all, the sleazy confines of the brothel featured nowhere in the commercial transactions of the average courtesan. They led their professional lives far more publically than that. They were the star guests of parties, recitals, dances and dinners. Most aimed to have relationships with no more than a select few patrons. Being greedy and parading too many men through the bedroom could sully a name forever. Looks mattered, of course. As did horizontal skills. But courtesans were also expected to be good conversationalists. It was taken for granted that with the right kind of patron, as much time would be spent out of bed as in. Being bright, witty, cultured and confident was essential. Musical skills were also necessary for those at the top of the profession. Familiarity with Petrarchan love poetry of the kind that was popular in 16th century Venice was vital. Aside from their literary merits, love poems acted as a highbrow starting line for the kind of chit chat that led to the mattress. Above all, courtesans had to come across as well bred and at ease in the elite circles they inevitably aspired to crack. They had to appear – at least, after a fashion - respectable.

It may seem odd to us that respectability was a component of this game. But not all courtesans came from lowly backgrounds. A sizeable number had been born into minor noble families whose cash had dried up. Lacking the funds for a dowry, or even the price of admission to a convent, didn’t leave a girl with much in the way of upwardly mobile options. Becoming a courtesan was the sensible choice for many. It was often encouraged by mothers who thought it offered their daughters a better chance at happiness than an upright life of excruciating poverty. Once enough destitute blue-bloods embraced the occupation, they osmotically conferred a seemliness on it, one which hinted at their aristocratic origins. Besides, courtesanship was an ancient tradition. It stretched back to Greece 2000 years before, where the distinction between courtesan and prostitute was first made explicit between the hetaerae who entertained at dinner parties and the lowly pornai who turned tricks in knocking shops under the squalid supervision of pimps. (We get the word pornography from this second group of women, where the –graphy bit means writings about.) Shining her guiding light over all courtesans was the extraordinary Aspasia of Miletus, who made her way to Athens in the 5th century BC and impressed some of the A list celebs of antiquity (Socrates, Plato and Xenophon) with her intellect, before becoming the lifelong companion and consort of the remarkable statesman Pericles. Here was an example of what the best courtesans might aspire to reach.

Although we don’t have much of a biography for her, there’s no doubt Angela Zaffetta – while not at the level of Aspasia - ticked the necessary boxes with a bit to spare. She was pretty. She was fiery. She was popular with the cultured crowd. It seems she never faked an orgasm either. (Although this genial habit may point less to a Gatling gun libido and more to an ability to put on a convincing show.) She comes up in Pietro Aretino’s writings from time to time, where he gives a few hints as to what may have made her so desirable. One letter stands out. It’s a reassuringly plain piece of prose compared to the ornamented puffery that normally dripped from the end of Pietro’s pen. He praised the decency with which Angela went about her business. He noted how the girl had done well for herself without any of the trickery that was normal for other courtesans. He lauded her virtue and sincerity. In spite of his gift for pornographic scribblings, he made no mention of alabaster skin or creamy breasts. All the applause was for personality. And Pietro was in a position to know. Angela was one of the dozen or so girls allowed to treat his house as their own, where, doubtless in exchange for assorted benefits, they could mingle advantageously with the jet set that passed through. In spite of their arguments – the letter mentions the young courtesan had a temper – the two were firm friends. So, it comes as no surprise to learn that La Zaffetta was a regular at the dinners Pietro shared so often with Titian. And it was likely over one such table that the trio planned the third picture the artist would paint for Ippolito de Medici in the hope it would persuade the cardinal to give Titian’s son a leg up the church ladder.

What to paint for a cardinal? In a clichéd world, a devotional picture of a Madonna and a pick ‘n’ mix of saints would do the trick. But Ippolito was not a cardinal with devotional tastes. He was an impatient creature of passion and appetite. He was desperate to be released from his formal position within the church so he could pass more time where he was happiest: loitering at the edge of a battlefield or roistering with a beauty in the bedroom. In all his life, Titian painted only one scene of war. It’s not something that interested him. But beauties were a different matter. Venetian artists were known for cranking out pictures of anonymous, good looking women. These pieces were known simply as belle donne. The models were courtesans who were painted so as to represent poetic ideals of feminine beauty rather than real life people. They often appeared with their hair unbound (an amorous signal in 16th century Venice) or with loose garments slipping suggestively off bare shoulders and partially bare breasts. Even though some came packaged with allusions to mythological stories, no one could mistake the sexy undertones. Most of these pieces weren’t commissioned. They were done on spec and would sit in the studio until they caught the eye of a visitor with a purse. Titian was no stranger to the genre. Over the previous 20 years he’d dashed out a few restrained belle donne of his own. If there was a kind of painting likely to appeal to Ippolito, this was it. There could be only one choice for the model: Angela, the courtesan who had enchanted the Medici cardinal enough to make him late for the Doge of Venice.

It’s impossible to know precisely what thoughts ran through Titian’s head as he settled himself in the studio and worked out how best to arrange the picture. But we can perhaps make a stab at some of the issues he would need to address. We know that throughout his career, he found it a struggle to claim from his patrons what he felt he was owed. As he started a project for a self absorbed young man, who to all appearances didn’t give a toss about inconveniencing others, this would have been a concern. It seems likely the picture hadn’t been commissioned either. It was a punt. A give and see, rather than a deliver and collect. Ippolito would feel no obligation to reward Titian unless he was handed something with an almighty wow factor. Would a standard bella donna shown from the waist up with loose clothing and tumbling hair do the trick? Possibly. But there was a potential church career for Titian’s son in the offing. Possibly wasn’t good enough. A full length, reclining nude of Angela, on the other hand, was sure to deliver the goods. And if her fingers strayed suggestively between her legs . . . well, giving the cardinal a little reminder of the bottomless pleasures he’d discovered in Venice could only be a good thing. Better yet, the risqué nature of the image would ensure he’d never have seen a picture like it before. And it would glow. It would breathe. It would stop the restless playboy dead in his tracks. As Titian finalised his plan, he would have grown quietly confident he was onto a winner. A few thousand well chosen brushstrokes were all that stood between his son and the highest church patronage, perhaps even the ear of the pope himself.

With Angela Zaffetta posing, Titian put out his paints and poured into his dippers the medium with which he would mix them. (Walnut oil for the lighter flesh colours which he was keen to keep as radiant as possible; quicker drying linseed oil for everything else.) If he was anything like other realist painters, he’d have started with the main focus of the picture: the undulating body and the bright, pretty face. When he wanted, he could be lightning fast. In the initial stages, with the fire of inspiration burning fresh and strong, things would have moved at a decent clip. The portrait of Angela would have been worked up briskly. So too the mass of the body. But at some point, things slowed to a crawl. We know as much because two years after the cardinal’s visit to Venice, we find Titian writing to the man’s secretary explaining that he was finishing a picture that was sure to please Ippolito. Finishing, not finished. Somewhere along the way, Titian had let the project slide.

This was not unusual for him. When he was uncertain what reward was coming his way, Titian would often lean a half completed picture against the studio wall, then dither for months or years before taking it up again. (Restorers have regularly found thick layers of dust lurking between one layer of paint and the next on his canvases.) For the most part, these pauses didn’t present a problem. But on this occasion it didn’t work out so well. Before the piece was in a fit state to make its way to Ippolito, the cardinal complicated things by dying. When an artist loses a patron before the payout, it’s rare a sober evening follows. Titian would have been enormously disappointed. The picture of la Zaffetta was supposed to pluck specifically at Ippolito’s strings. With his unexpected exit – the rumours pointed to poison - the incomplete piece became an orphan. Even if others wanted it, who amongst them could deliver the church career Titian so desperately wanted for Pomponio? It’s easy to imagine how he might have thrown up his arms in despair. He’d taken a chance and gambled. And it had been for nothing.

We hear no more of the painting until three years later, when another youthful aristocrat arrived in town and made his way to Titian to have his portrait done. While sitting in the studio, the 24 year old saw the picture and decided on the spot he had to have it. This was Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino: the fellow assumed by all, until recently, to have commissioned the piece to mark the occasion of his adolescent wife, Giulia, coming of age. But the picture’s origins had nothing to do with him personally. He merely hoovered up the leftovers of a deal between others that never came off. The painting he brought to his home was just a risqué representation of the onetime mistress of another man.

This is the point where the Pinups can rest their case. With some confidence too. They have on their side some careful research into the personalities who were involved. Better yet, important parts are corroborated by what we find in letters. But a rested case is not a closed case. That’s why we ought to turn now to another interpretation of the picture. It first trickled into the discussion in the early 60s with a professor called Theodore Reff. He spotted that Titian had included something interesting in the picture that didn’t quite fit with the Pinups’ analysis. For 35 years, his observations sat unloved and ignored, until in the late 90s they were repackaged and turbo charged by the excellent art historian Rona Goffen. Rona, like Theodore, felt the Pinups had overlooked vital clues on the canvas which pointed to a more complex theme. She was determined to set things right.

It’s strange to report, but the chief reason why our two art historians managed to spy out something new was because they both paid attention to the background of the painting. Previously, no one who wrote about Titian’s Venus had bothered to do this. At least, not properly. All eyes were on the gleaming body up front. It’s a bizarre lapse. Particularly as this is one of the world’s more iconic artworks, and there’s clearly quite a bit happening at its back end. But for centuries, the men of letters breezed past this quadrant of the canvas, pausing only to make one or two trivial observations. The lukewarm interest would be baffling if it weren’t for the sorry fact (one that’s been especially true over the last forty years) that those with the most credentials when it comes to writing about pictures often have the least interest in the stories artists paint into them. A soft spot for narratives, you see, is considered a bit vulgar. The true connoisseur prefers a loftier perch. From here, he or she can get on with the flatulent business of crow-barring aesthetics or – more depressingly nowadays – politics and sociology out of the canvas, whether they’re to be found there or not. The way our new acquaintances did things, however, was solidly grounded. And it opened the door to a host of interesting contributions from others. For reasons that’ll become clear in a moment, we’ll lump the whole tribe together under the tag of the ‘Babymakers’.

The Babymakers’ big reveal centres on the chests at the back of the room behind the nude. They’re long, they’re low, they’re decorated, and they’re a pair. They also seem to contain clothes. (See how the standing figure has a dress slung over her shoulder, as if it’s just been taken out, or is perhaps about to be put away.) Expensive clothing chests like these were particular to the smart set in towns like Florence and Venice. They were called cassoni. Nearly always, they were bought as a pair to be given to a bride on the occasion of her marriage. As she moved in with her new husband, the cassoni would house her belongings. Practically and symbolically, they were part of the matrimonial process. Obviously, this is not what we would expect to find in a sexed up picture of a courtesan. And certainly not one intended for – of all people – a cardinal, no matter how unorthodox his personal life. Clearly, there’s more to the painting than what the Pinups claim. In fact, if we let the Babymakers stretch their legs over the next few paragraphs, we’ll see they make a case for a whole lot more. We may as well start with that troubling hand between the thighs.

The Babymakers don’t try to explain it away. They’re happy enough with the notion the girl in the painting is pleasuring herself. They point out that although the various theological and medical tracts available in Titian’s time pencilled down masturbation as something for degenerates and sickos, they did grant there were certain circumstances where, through gritted teeth, it could be sanctioned. Brace yourself for a fascinating nugget of old world medicine. In the 16th century and before, it was thought that the best way to bring about a pregnancy was to ensure that, when they coupled, both parties came at the same time, or as near as possible. So far so good. But Renaissance love lives were stuffed with as many bungling clichés as our own. It was not unheard of for the bloke to finish his sprint while the girl was still limbering up at the starting line. In an awkward situation like this, one which was as disappointing for babies as it was for grownups, a few dextrous notes on the fiddle, enough to make sure everyone got to the chorus, could be tolerated. This, say the Babymakers, is what Titian is referencing.

The thing to note here is that the activity in question was not about pleasure. At least, not primarily. It was about breeding. And breeding was important enough to warrant a lot of advice. Simultaneous orgasms were a good start, but if more was needed, the experts had plenty of other suggestions on how to get the job done. The 15th century physician Michele Savonarola, for example, recommended that straight after congress, the woman involved should clamp her thighs together to stop any air getting in where it wasn’t wanted. Air, we learn, could have a corrosive effect on those life giving liquids. She should also raise her legs up in a single ten minute ab-crunch so as to encourage everything to flow in the right direction. This was taxing stuff. It was a workout in addition to a make out. Assuming he was interested in addressing the subject of conception, Titian was kind enough to spare us from athletic measures like these. They would have been pictorially absurd. But there is a quieter one he may have fitted in.

The Babymakers point out that The Venus of Urbino is the only one of Titian’s reclining nudes (he produced many more in the years that followed) to turn her body so that she rests on her right side. The others are either on their left or are more centrally planted on their back. For the men who’d written the antique medical texts, this axis had significance. They believed that the right of the body was warmer than the left. They were also convinced that the internal workings of men had a higher operating temperature than what was normal for women, much as a diesel engine has compared to one run on petrol. Because of this, it was thought that a woman in need of a son should lie on her right during or after the act so as to ensure the coital gloop slid into the zones where there was warmth enough to incubate boys. The prospect of success was immensely improved if, in addition, the dad to-be could fire the impregnating shot from his right nut. Although sadly none of the boffins ever clarified how this riveting instruction might be carried out.

At first, these theories may seem a faintly ludicrous explanation for the behaviour we see in the painting. Yet open the works of Guainerius, Galen, Falloppio, Paré and other authorities the world has since forgotten, and sure enough delicately worded passages on the benefits of the self induced orgasm and body temperature are there in black and white. We cannot discount the possibility The Venus of Urbino is a girl on a baby mission. At the very least, we can’t assume her hand acts solely in the service of gratification. Sure, the specific recommendations of how to initiate a pregnancy 500 years ago were the nonsense nostrums of an age armed with biological understandings that were primeval compared to our own. But they were the best people had to go on. It seems unlikely that Titian – a borderline hypochondriac with a roving interest in matters of health – would have been unaware of the medical intelligence.

Having set the scene, the Babymakers push their argument along by drawing our attention to the circumstances in which the painting was sold. They point out that when Guidobaldo II della Rovere bought the picture, his young wife Giulia da Varano was coming of age. The pair had been wedded a couple of years previously in one of those marriages of political advantage that were standard amongst the best families. But Giulia wasn’t even a teenager at the time. Decency demanded there be no shenanigans in the bedroom until the girl was a few years older. That threshold of maturity was crossed in 1538, at more or less the time Guidobaldo bought the painting. The Babymakers believe he did this to mark the event. It wouldn’t have been unusual either. The Italian upper classes regularly bought pictures from big name artists when celebrating their unions during the Renaissance. Normally these were mythological works or religious pieces – the sort of things you could comfortably hang on the wall in front of grandparents. But within this group there was a subset: paintings that centred on Venus. (The Babymakers, by the way, are certain our reclining beauty is Venus, and not merely a ‘naked woman’.) There is even a name for these artworks: epithalamic paintings. This is the sort of terrifying, tongue-twisting vocabulary that instantly turns people off. But when you break the word down to its Greek roots, it simply means ‘in front of the wedding chamber’. The phrase comes from a brand of poetry that used to be written to celebrate marriages in the ancient world. Venus often figured in these poems, and was usually presented as a kind of pagan patron saint for young brides. During the Renaissance this tradition was revived by cultured types. All that changed was the medium, which expanded from poetry into paint.

No one would claim that epithalamic pictures were common. But we do know quite a few Venetian artists had paintings of Venus purchased from them to mark marriages. These pieces often made their way to the bedchamber of the couple so the goddess could hover over them both as they got on with the ins and outs of married life. The Venus of Urbino belonged to this specialised class. In that sense, there was nothing unusual about her. Sure, the hand poised centre-stage was an erotic stroke. But it didn’t detract from the practical measures the gesture referenced. Besides, nothing we see is out of step with the sort of insinuations that sometimes crop up in the poems that inspired these pictures. An epithalamic work destined for newlyweds wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t allow for some eroticism; it was intended for two people hell bent on procreation. Once we understand this, it becomes clear that Titian’s efforts were perfectly in line with a celebration of matrimony. He was not, as the Pinups suggest, going rogue and painting a standalone centrefold. He was playing along with a well established theme.

It goes without saying that epithalamic paintings are a long way removed from the wedding imagery 21st century couples take for granted. We’d have been more interested in an upbeat picture of the beaming couple striding hand in hand down the aisle into an obliging future. But works like these weren’t supposed to commemorate. Their purpose was to instruct, inspire and assist. The dynastic marriages that took place between aristocrats often involved girls a year or two shy of their teens. They might not (they better not!) be very worldly. Anything that put the inexperienced bride in mind of the role she was about to take on was a useful aid. A representation of Venus looking hot-blooded and willing was just the thing to get the message across. We have to remember that a young wife’s number one duty was the production of children as quickly as possible. A well brought up girl like Giulia da Varano would need all the direction she could get. She wasn’t the only one in need of help. Her husband might need it too.

The clichéd thinker may suppose that Guidobaldo’s decision to have a naked goddess on show in the house was due to a smuttier motive than an interest in poetic traditions. He probably just wanted to get his own carnal cogs whirring and used the whole epithalamic lark as a fig leaf. But we shouldn’t be too hasty. There may well have been more to it than that. This was the 16th century, a time when the evil eye was a persistent worry in Italy. (Not that it isn’t now.) So too was witchery. Over the first three decades of the 1500s, 110 people were put to death for sorcery in the region west of Venice. Spells and curses were no laughing matter. It wasn’t unreasonable for a man with enemies to expect a supernatural attack. Inevitably, it was his lunchbox which was treated as the bullseye. The highest profile casualty in this attritional war between man and magic was none other than Guidobaldo’s adoptive grandfather, Guidobaldo I, who died childless and impotent, convinced his breeding prospects had been scuppered by witchcraft. It wasn’t like he was a purblind twit happy to indulge peasant superstitions either. His court at Urbino was a centre of humanist learning, bristling with top-end scholars. Yet even there, hexes and magic were taken seriously. Amongst other things, images of Venus were considered a reasonable defence against this sort of upsetting attention. All the better if they were located in the bedchamber where the tackle was put to the test. So we shouldn’t be surprised that once he got the painting home, Guidobaldo II marched it into the apartments which he and Giulia shared. Here was a man determined to avoid the barren fate of his grandfather and sire some kids.

 We tend to forget how important procreation was to families like this. Nothing could be left to chance. Illness, plague and premature death were everywhere. Money bought scant reprieve. The very young were up against it most of all. The lagoon around Venice was forever topped up by tears shed over the pitifully small graves that swallowed countless, beloved, helpless children. In such a world, conceiving was not a lifestyle choice to be chewed over carefully once the mortgage was under control. It was an elemental necessity. Without a production line of babies, dynastic ruin and unbearable heartbreak were only ever one pathogen away. The prospect of having to deal with spells as well as all the normal hazards was enough to chill the blood of anyone with a shred of sense. Anything, absolutely anything, that might benefit the act of conception was a welcome ally.

Death, curses and impotence weren’t the only issues to be dealt with when it came to having children. There was also disfigurement. True, most Italians were as fascinated by birth defects as they were appalled. Had the Elephant Man been born there, Renaissance Venice would have supplied him with an audience every bit as dogged as Victorian London’s. But no one wanted such a fate for their own child. One of the tricks used to dodge the unjust darts of chance rested on a theory we know as ‘Maternal Impression’. This hypothesis proposed that babies in-utero could be moulded by externalities witnessed by their mums. It’s easiest in this scenario to imagine the foetus as a length of film in a camera, while the mother’s eyes are the lens. At any moment, an event – repellent or wholesome - can be transmitted through the eye to the womb, imprinting itself physically on the baby.

Although it’s long since been discredited, the idea had a traction in Renaissance Italy that wasn’t unlike the ‘Mozart Effect’ today, where parents are advised to play music to their unborn kids in the expectation it’ll hasten their mental development. (For what it’s worth, this has been studied with some seriousness at the Institut Marques fertility clinic. Apparently, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was a foetal favourite when piped in via specially developed ‘vaginal speakers’. Nope, I’ve no idea either.) During the Renaissance, the great Florentine polymath and intellect Alberti was the theory’s most conspicuous advocate. He advised mothers to-be to spend time in front of pictures of ‘dignity and handsome appearance.’ Such paintings, he thought, would rub off on the unborn, ensuring the best possible beginning to life. It followed that enriching and beautiful paintings should be hung in the places where a pregnant woman spent most her time. And, as we know, it was in exactly such a set of rooms that the Venus of Urbino ended up after she left Titian’s studio.

In spite of all the context, some modern eyes will roll in despair at the thought of an attractive courtesan masturbating lazily on the wall of a bride’s boudoir. They’d say that whatever obscure justifications get thrown about, no woman has ever wanted such a thing staring down at her in the marital bed. And what husband would hang it there who wasn’t a pig? Isn’t this just another sad entry in the infinite catalogue of young women who’ve had to endure obnoxious behaviour from the men they married? But this is a contemporary understanding jammed clumsily onto a bygone age. It’s too easy to forget that the past is a foreign country. If things are different there, it’s sometimes with good reason. A 21st century audience mightn’t be convinced by the notion of a painting acting as a conception manual, an amulet against devilry, a visual vitamin dose to protect from deformity, and a poetic commemoration of marriage. They might point to the fact that we have no direct evidence that the artist had all, or any, of these things in mind when he painted the picture. Yet each of these rationalisations has the benefit of being grounded in concerns that were both real and normal in Titian’s time. They also fit snugly with the matrimonial theme that’s flagged up by the pair of chests. If we brush aside all the Babymakers’ suggestions and stick instead with the Pinups’, how are we to square those cassoni with the rest of the canvas? We can’t. We’d be left with a picture that makes no sense.

This is probably the best moment to take our leave of the rival camps and strike out on our own. Both sides make a persuasive case. But something’s not right. On the one hand, the Pinups have no explanation for the wedding chests. On the other, the Babymakers can’t square their matrimonial themes with a cardinal who was never going to marry. It’s a logjam. There’s good news though. The tangled threads can be unpicked. The key is that snippet we had earlier from the restorers, where we learned that many of Titian’s picture’s contain large amounts of dust between one layer of paint and the next. This was a man in the habit of blasting out a chunk of a painting, then forgetting about it for months or years at a time. The routine will be familiar to many painters, writers, and musicians, all of whom will know that projects which are revisited over years very rarely end as they began. Along the way, fresh frameworks come into play. Often, the finished piece, for better or worse, moves so far from the original idea that it’s conceptually unrecognisable. We know Titian started planning his Venus at some point after Ippolito’s visit to Venice in 1532, and that the painting was unfinished in 1534. It was still in the studio when the cardinal died in the summer of 1535, and only left for Guidobaldo’s home 3 years later in 1538. This is an artwork which had plenty of time to evolve. It’s very likely it was retooled along the way. Particularly if, when Ippolito died, the background wasn’t finished. This would have left a handy space in which Titian could redirect the painting’s meaning, moving it forward from the tomcat interests of the cardinal to suit buyers of a less boisterous humour. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We need to go back to the very beginning and the image that inspired Titian’s Venus in the first place. It’s time to investigate one of the most boring books in all of Italian literature.