In The Lap of the Gods

Part II

By the standards of the time, Venice was an unusually well-read town. When totted up, there were close to 450 printers and booksellers present in the city. Between them, they sold millions of copies of roughly 18,000 different books. Very few of these, however, could rival the weirdness of a volume that came off the presses in 1499. It was written by a Dominican Monk called Francesco Colonna, and its title was Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which means ‘Poliphilo’s struggle for love in a dream’. (For the sake of a saner life, we’ll call it HP.) At its most basic, it’s a journey through a dreamscape filled with countless plant species, vast quantities of classical architecture and some formal gardens. Hardly the stuff of a white-knuckle ride. But what gives the book its special flavour is not its encyclopaedic attention to botany and buildings. It’s the bonkers mixture of the surreal and the erotic. For starters, the tale isn’t just a dream. It’s a dream dreamt within a dream – a bit like the movie Inception.  Down in the gurgling vaults of his Jungian subconscious, the narrator, Poliphilo, trudges about in search of his (reluctant) true love, Polia. Dragons, dryads and assorted others cross his path as he goes. Most of these merit a lengthy descriptive passage. But not of what they do so much as what they look like. Poliphilo’s obsessed with appearances. This sounds harmless enough until we start making pit-stops to admire the classical buildings that litter his path. At first, it seems that he’s just a big architecture fan. But then, as the pages go by, it slowly dawns on you that he’s not only describing, he’s salivating. In fact, if the structure is splendid enough, he’ll caress it and work himself into a disturbing erotic frenzy. It’s very easy to find yourself wondering if the lovelorn hero has succumbed to some sort of deranged medieval fetish.

On its own, this would be enough to make the book bizarre. But the experience is made nuttier by the language. It’s an almost unreadable mishmash of Italian and Latin, with a side order of Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. To round things off, we’re regularly ambushed by made-up words. These little sprinklings of originality really don’t help. Although there are around 170 strange and beautiful woodcut prints which do; even if they ratchet up the story’s odd atmosphere. For the average reader, it can feel as if the entire thing was put together by a multilingual architect off his head on mushrooms and Viagra. But this isn’t the case for everyone. There are devotees who believe HP’s a rare allegorical work that disguises within its pages important esoteric knowledge. Whether true or not, this notion has grabbed the imagination of the authors of mystery novels like The Rule Of Four and The Club Dumas, both of which give the book an airing in their plotlines. Even Roman Polanski spared it a thought in his 1999 movie The Ninth Gate based on the latter of the two. (It’s an alright watch, even if the special effects have aged terribly.)  

If talk of mysteries and riddles whets your interest, and you think you might give the book a go, be warned: HP can have the same effect as a double dose of Valium. In the case of one building, we’re treated to a fifty page description. Five of these comprise – I kid you not – lovingly recited measurements of its entrance. It’s tedium like this which has led one unimpressed academic to pronounce the tome very close to being the single most boring work in all of Italian literature. Given the heavyweight contenders in the category, this is a punchy criticism. It’s fair though. The book may have acquired a decently sized audience by the mid 1500s, but there’s no pretending it’s a page turner. When it first came out, it did alright amongst a narrow literary set in Venice, and hardly anyone else. Yet it is, nonetheless, a gorgeous object. It’s famed for its appearance. The font, pictures and layout are breathtaking. (It was no surprise to hear in 2010 that someone had dropped over £300,000 at auction for one of the 30 surviving first editions.) And, if you stick with it, some satisfying themes break through the crust formed by the inscrutable text. It’s a celebration of all those things that have been rendered beautiful by artistry. It’s an erotic tour through a land where humanism, not Christian dogma, has brought about the monuments which get Poliphilo drooling. It’s a manual on how the senses should guide us to cherish what is good. It suggests that the best form of love between a man and woman is neither too randy nor too rational, but somewhere in between. (Poliphilo slowly figures out that he can have what he wants only if he learns to temper his urges.) And it’s all set in a world where Venus, as we shall see shortly, has a good deal more influence than usual.

If we open the story about a quarter of the way through, we find ourselves joining Poliphilo as he’s chased from a wood by a Hellish dragon breathing out poisonous black fumes. Trembling with relief, he escapes into some beautiful countryside, and espies an octagonal marble building where he can take refuge. Included in its structure is a fountain carved in the image of a naked sleeping nymph. We can see her in the woodcut that accompanies the text. This image is important for our detective work. Although reclining female nudes could occasionally be found in 16th century Venice in the form of carved gems and other artefacts, this one - thanks to HP’s traction with culture vultures - was the first to trickle into the mainstream. Previously, people were used to nudes which stood, sat, crouched, leaned and generally stuck to a chaste vertical axis. The woodcut ditched those restraints and introduced its audience to a more suggestive horizontal pose. The naked nymph lies on her right; her legs are crossed; one hand lies over her thigh while the other rests under her head; her hair is unbound; her body faces the viewer. Although her waist is modestly wrapped in cloth, the figure’s similarities with the Venus of Urbino are unmissable. It’s not just the way she’s posed either. It’s her identity. Although it’s vague in the text, the scholars who’ve dug into HP tend to think of her as a cipher for Venus. There’s no getting round it. Titian’s famous painting from the 1530s is derived from a woodcut in a book from 1499. It’s not a direct link though. There’s another picture that came between the two in 1510. This was by an artist only a sliver less famous than Titian: the enigmatic and magnificent Giorgione.

Giorgione’s a peculiar fellow. His paintings are a slow burn. It takes a while to get used to them. But everyone who spares them the time falls in love. This is probably why he’s one of the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance. In spite of all the affection though, we know next to nothing of the man. From his nickname, Zorzi (Big George), we imagine he was a burly bloke. We know a little about his training. We’re confident he hung out with a literary crowd and enjoyed books. But after that, we’re down to whispers and glimpses. We can’t even agree on his catalogue. Of the dozens of works associated with his name, only a few are certain. Even so, this handful has been enough to assure his reputation as a thoughtful, poetic painter whose pictures ooze mystery and otherworldliness.

He and Titian were contemporaries. While they were young men, they rubbed shoulders (uneasily, we think) on shared projects such as the frescoes commissioned by the German merchants of Venice for their headquarters. As is occasionally the case when great talents go head to head, each matched the other so intensely that it’s sometimes impossible to tell which of the pair painted what. The issue’s made thornier by rumours that Titian, after Giorgione died of plague in his early thirties, completed some of his peer’s unfinished works. One of these was a dreamy nude slumbering in a landscape. She’s called the Sleeping Venus. She’s kept these days in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. And it’s obvious where Giorgione got the idea for her. She’s a dead ringer for the figure in the HP woodcut. Just as Titian’s Venus, painted 20 years later, is a dead ringer for Giorgione’s, right down to the wandering hand. What we have here, then, is three generations in the same family. The Venus of Urbino is the grandchild. If we’re going to understand her properly, we should try to work out what was going on in Giorgione’s mind when he painted her predecessor, and how the HP Venus might have influenced him. We’ll return briefly to the book.

The story in HP, such as it is, unfolds at the pace of molasses running up a hill. Poliphilo’s usually too busy frothing over buildings to move his threadbare tale along. This means that when something important happens, it stands out starkly. There’s one incident which is especially climactic. As Giorgione flicked through the pages from which he nicked his nude, it would have jumped out at him. It’s worth retelling. It’s the moment when Poliphilo – having made zero progress in his quest to find Polia - decides to follow the path of Venus. His fruitless wanderings have brought him to three gates carved into a mountain face. They each open into a unique realm where different values hold sway. Only one will lead to Polia. Poliphilo must choose correctly by meeting briefly with the individual gatekeepers behind each entrance. These are a trio of women. The first is a drab, pious crone representing a Godly life. Poliphilo isn’t at all keen on this, and steps back. The second is a fierce and muscular lady brandishing a sword. She stands for earthly effort and glory. This is an improvement, but likewise doesn’t appeal greatly to our man. The third is a noble and seductive temptress. She represents the Mother of Love or Venus. Poliphilo’s much cheerier about this option. He steps through the portal and it closes behind him. Instantly, things look up. A gang of sassy bare-breasted nymphs gather round and grind against him provocatively. Just as the teasing reaches boiling point and Poliphilo totters deliriously at the edge of reason, they dash off again. Then, a few lines later, Polia approaches. Although it takes a little while for her to be recognised by her beau, the couple are at last united. More nymphs turn up to initiate them into the rites of love in a temple dedicated to Venus. Joy and celebrations abound. Of course, a little later, poor Poliphilo wakes up and realises it was all a dream. As endings go, it’s a bit of a downer. But a number of messages have been transmitted loud and clear. Prominent amongst them is that when it comes to the deepest forms of human fulfilment, Venus pays out much better than earthly glory. Or even God.

This recasting of Venus as a more powerful figure than normal repeats throughout the book. She’s never presented to us in her usual role as a mere goddess of love. She’s always greater and more nourishing than that. She’s called – and the distinction is important - the mother of love. The idea is ramped up at the temple to which Poliphilo and Polia are brought. It’s described as the temple of Venus Physizoe: Venus, source of all life in nature. In fact, if we scroll back up to the woodcut of the nude carved into the fountain, we can spot underneath it – as Giorgione doubtless did - a Greek inscription which reads Panton Tokadi: the mother of all. Taken together, these titles point to a vastly more substantial deity than the one we imagine hovering around besotted couples and bedrooms. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili transformed Venus into the ultimate feminine godhead from which everything worthwhile is born.

The characterisation was unusual. But it wasn’t brand new. In his poem De Rarum Natura, the Roman writer Lucretius was the first to play around with the concept of Venus as a supreme generative figure. He didn’t think of her as a personality though. He was sceptical of the existence of gods. He felt she was a principle rather than an entity. If she could be said to exist at all, it was as a symbolic embodiment of reproduction. Ovid, who came after him, had slightly different notions. But again, he was a poet with no time for something so minor as a goddess of love. He was more interested in the idea of Venus as a generating force. In his Fasti , he cast her as the prime mover who created things as fundamental as the sky, the earth and the seas. Our Roman friends even had a phrase for the goddess in this role: Venus genetrix omnium (creator of all). Both poets were popular in book-loving Venice. Lucretius in particular was the subject of much chatter among the chin-stroking library-lovers of Giorgione’s time. Finding a repetition of the ideas touted by the antique poets, while he pondered the reclining nude he was about to kidnap from HP, was probably all the inspiration the painter needed. He would depict Venus less as a god of love, and more as a giver of life. We better see how he did it.

Most people, when they look at the Sleeping Venus, are drawn immediately to the long stretched out figure that occupies the front of the canvas. And anyone who’s read this far, will instantly zone in on the familiar sight of wayward fingers exploring forbidden places. But before we try to understand events between the thighs, we’ll have a look at the landscape. This is where Giorgione does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of his message. On the right, we can see a number of buildings. They’ve been painted large enough to dominate their quarter of the picture. This means they’re important. If we zoom in on them, we quickly spot a handsomely proportioned stone manor house sitting tidily on the hilltop. It’s in good repair with a sturdy balcony overlooking the landscape. A number of buildings cluster around it. These are made from wood. Thanks to their broad low entrances and the timberwork visible on their sides, we can tell that they are the barns where the harvest is stored. And they’re massive. They utterly dwarf the manor house. It’s as if a gang of hulking aircraft carriers were moored around a yacht. Of course, we expect barns to be larger than houses. But these are exceptional. Giorgione’s gone to great lengths to make their scale unmissable. The message is plain. The landscape the sleeping Venus presides over is one of extraordinary abundance. The harvests are so bountiful they can only be housed in a series of gargantuan outhouses.

It’s not just the buildings that tell this tale. To the left are a pair of rich green fields bounded by rows of trees. It’s no barren wilderness out there. The land is productive. Further beyond, a broad lake stretches into the distance. There will never be a drought or a shortage if a well dries up. If we look closely at the distant shore that lies beyond the lake, we can make out a pair of tower-like buildings. If we look closer still, we discover one of these (possibly both) appears to be a windmill. This is a very telling inclusion. Windmills simply don’t feature in Italian paintings of the time. At all. If Giorgione decided to introduce something so abnormal, it can only be because it was vital to the picture’s overall theme. The obvious conclusion is that he wanted his audience to think of crops that need grinding, such as olives and wheat. Implying their presence with an unusual but easily recognised structure was a cunning move. It meant he could skip the clumsier task of painting muddy grey olive groves and loud yellow wheat fields without losing any of the message. It’s a lovely piece of inventiveness.

A windmill isn’t the only uncharacteristic thing to show up in the picture. If we return to the settlement on the hill, high above the 16th century buildings are the remnants of an antique classical edifice. This is interesting. Ancient architecture doesn’t occur in Giorgione’s works. He liked to keep things contemporary with his own time. So it’s a safe bet there’s an implication here. If we squint closer, we find the structure is overgrown and collapsed in places. Even so, its ramparts soar imposingly over the homestead built at its base. Not only does this point to the ancient world Venus comes from and how it looms large over the present, it’s surely the case that the manor house was fashioned from stone which fell from those archaic parapets. The old has given birth to the new, and even now coexists with it.

It’s worth looking at the foliage around the picture too. Trees are prominent. Particularly the two that occupy the middle third of the canvas. These have been painted so as to stand out strongly against the sky. Giorgione wants them to be noticed. (We’ll come back to this pair in a few moments; they’ve a crucial role in what follows.) He’s done the same with the plant growth atop the knoll behind the goddess. This is unmistakably a small bay tree – many will know it as laurel - the leaves of which were traditionally part of the crowns the ancients dished out for special achievements and victories. Giorgione deploys it over Venus’ head in a natural and unforced way. He mightn’t have her wearing a wreath, but he nonetheless suggests the goddess before us is a triumphant figure. He honours her. He shows us she’s supreme.

All these references are intriguing enough in their own right. But the allusions to crops and trees catch the eye. They tie in neatly with a line in Ovid’s Fasti, where he credits Venus for the existence of both. He even mentions how grass grows under her watch, something we see echoed in the intense, lush greenery sprouting below and behind the goddess. Grass never appears in such overwhelming quantities in any of Giorgione’s other pieces, most of which sport terrain made up of dusty, packed earth dotted with shrubs. We’re looking at a deliberate effort to mirror the Roman poet’s thoughts as closely as possible. And it’s relentless. Everywhere we look we find the signs. The entire landscape from front to back is churning out the goods. It’s an earthly Eden. Venus lies in front of it. The slumbering queen on her gilt edged fabrics. Beautiful, unconquerable and generous. The mother of all we see.

Now we’ve a rough idea of the theme of Giorgione’s background, we can turn to the elephant in the room: those fingers curling into intimate places. How are we to reconcile them with what we’ve discovered in the rest of the picture? If we borrow the centrefold notions the Pinups put forward to explain Titian’s Venus, it’s obvious they just don’t fit with what Giorgione’s painted. The same can be said for the big idea proposed by the Babymakers. Both groups believe the fingers are servicing human needs like pleasure and conception. What possible justification could there be for either here? There isn’t one. We’re looking at a divine giver of life. She’s not a centrefold fumbling for kicks. And she’s certainly not a demonstration of how a young bride might conceive with a wham-bam lover. She’s far grander than that. No. If the hand signals anything, it’s Venus’ abundance. Giorgione’s planted her fingers between the loins to alerts us to her generative power, and the feminine spring from which her bounty emerges. He’s painting her as the cosmic mother we find in Ovid, Lucretius and HP. It’s risky stuff, to be sure. But if the hand was placed anywhere else, even as little as an inch or two more modestly to the side, the message would be lost. Granted, it may be a tall order to understand any of it at first. For most of us, a gesture of this kind can only have a sexual connotation. But the painting wasn’t meant for us. It was for someone else. Someone who had a set of reference points a long way from our own.

This was a man called Girolamo Marcello. In his youth, he was something of a 007 character. He was sophisticated, came from a good background, was armed with a ready supply of cash, and had a patriotic taste for espionage. As a well-connected young merchant, he’d been booted out of Constantinople by the Ottomans for spying, and had to return to his hometown of Venice. But there was no disgrace in the setback. Girolamo kept a fine house, a shining reputation, and was awarded high offices. He also enjoyed the company of the same literary set as Giorgione. The ideas and books we’ve encountered would have been familiar territory for him. With common interests like these, the former spy and the artist got on well enough that Girolamo bought three pieces from Giorgione. The third and last of these was The Sleeping Venus, which was commissioned a couple of years before the painter died of plague.

During the Renaissance, it was often the case that a patron who did repeat business with an artist would have an intellectual connection with them. Especially if their literary tastes overlapped. So, we’re not looking at a situation where a wealthy dimwit lobbed cash at a painter for whatever he had in stock that matched the dining room wallpaper. This was a meeting of educated equals. Undoubtedly, they’d have discussed the picture in advance. The Venus before us is the synthesis of both their well-lettered imaginations. Given the rarefied books these men dipped in and out of, we shouldn’t be surprised if her gesture signifies something more elevated than base biological activities. It’s also worth pointing out that Venus had a special relevance for Girolamo. His family claimed they were descended from her through the Trojan hero Aeneas. It would be an odd thing to request a picture of great-great-granny interfering with herself. She wasn’t a gynaecological manual. She wasn’t a pleasure seeking hussy either. She was a totem for the Marcello family lineage. And the concept of lineage, as we’re about to see, is central to the painting. Literally.

There’s something wonderfully odd about the way Giorgione’s composed the picture. He’s chosen to place a hum-drum tree stump at the precise centre of the canvas. This is an unexpected move. Giorgione normally avoids geometric devices in his paintings. He prefers designs that are more natural. But the stump’s conspicuous location does have an advantage: it’s a great way of telling the viewer it’s important. To help get this across, Giorgione also isolates it. There’s nothing close enough to distract from its centrality. This is the pictorial equivalent of erecting a lone radio mast in the middle of a meadow and mowing a broad circle around its base. It stands out. Anyone with the wit to look will understand a signal is being broadcast.

On either side, the two trees we noted earlier loom eye-catchingly against the sky. Each is exactly the same horizontal distance from the stump. They feel like very much like a pair of pendants that have been symmetrically arranged around a focal point. They’re also connected to the stump via the two hills they occupy. The ridgelines formed by the hills run directly into that solitary stub of tree trunk and terminate there. Every realist painter with an old fashioned eye for design will do a little double-take when they spot this. It’s considered bad practice to allow the contours of separate features to end at a single shared point. Particularly if that terminal happens to be at the precise centre of the painting. It looks unnatural and contrived. Never more so than in a landscape. But Giorgione – an absolute master of naturalism - has broken these rules. When we put this alongside his use of geometry and symmetry, it’s clear the man’s on a mission. He’s determined that the two trees and the stump should be tethered to each other and emphasised to the viewer. Why?

Funnily enough, it doesn’t take much to unscramble what’s going on here. It’s probably best to start with the stump. It’s the latch on the door we want to open. In 16th century Italian, as now, the word for a stump was ceppo. But Italian, like any other language, can allow multiple definitions of a word. If it’s used in a literary sense, ceppo has a meaning closer to what we get from the English words bloodline or stock. This is the connotation Giorgione was after. He used the stump as a cipher for the notion of family. It’s an idea he’d played around with before. In his painting of shepherds paying their respects to the new born Christ, he’d dropped in a stump opposite the Holy Family as a conceptual echo of the two parents and their baby. But this time, he wanted the idea front and centre. It’s no accident he’s situated it just above the productive loins of the mythical matriarch. She was, after all, the source from which Girolamo’s lineage sprang.

The reason the picture addresses these dynastic themes is straightforward. It was commissioned to celebrate Girolamo’s marriage. It belongs to that epithalamic class of paintings we met with earlier. If we turn to the two trees, it’s clear they represent the bride and groom, or, at the very least, the masculine and the feminine. One is elegant, slender and fair. The other is compact, bushy and robust. Each curves gently towards the other; perhaps a modest sign of their shared affection. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible the settlements on the left and right of the landscape in some sense represent their family homes. The bride leaves hers behind to join her husband at his formidable household, which, as we saw earlier, overflows with divine bounty. Much more definite is the manner in which the pair are brought together and united - via their respective ridgelines - in the concept of family represented by the ceppo. Better yet, fresh shoots emerge from the stump. These are an expression of the children the newlyweds hope to have. And with a supreme procreative goddess presiding over the couple’s union, why wouldn’t they?

Of course, there’s more to the painting than lineage, breeding and the blessings of a divine mother figure. Giorgione’s too poetic to leave things there. It’s also about love and human tragedy. When we look at the bottom left of the picture, we can see four or five tiny yellow blossoms emerging from the grass beneath Venus. These are anemones. In symbolic terms, they’re an easy read. If we turn to another work of Ovid’s which was well-thumbed in 16th century Italy, Metamorphoses, we find the dainty flowers turn up in the story of Venus and Adonis. The relevant passage can be found at the end of book X. It describes the goddess mourning her lover who’s bled to death after a boar has gored him through his crotch. Her grief is so dreadful she sets out to immortalise her devotion to the dead youth. She sprinkles fragrant nectar onto the blood pooled around Adonis. Wherever it falls, within an hour, an anemone springs up. The fragile, short-lived blossom instantly becomes an emblem of love and a poetic reminder that even for the gods nothing - no matter how precious - can last forever. And here the flower is, poking through the grassy canopy underneath the goddess, a signal not only of the love Girolamo shares with his bride, but also its mortal constraints.

All in all, this is the most beautifully arranged metaphor for marriage in western art. Yes, Giorgione’s taken a philosophical bicycle pump to the goddess of love and inflated her into a cosmic mother figure. But he’s joined this idea to the matrimonial theme his patron required so smoothly and with such elegance it’s impossible to find fault. Every touch is subtle yet bang on the button. There’s no flab, no clumsiness, no uncertainty. The only question we might ask is why he chose a view of nature to express ideas we normally think of as belonging to the human realm. But Giorgione was passionate about the natural world. He invented landscape painting more or less single-handedly. He seems to have believed there was a truth and sense of meaning to the rural outdoors that could adequately explain anything. Spend a little time getting to know The Sleeping Venus, as we have, and it’s hard not to agree. How appropriate it is that the picture is the finest he ever managed. And how sad it is that he was dead before the final varnish was brushed over it. This is where Titian re-enters our story.

Most scholars believe that when Giorgione lost his life to the plague, the Sleeping Venus was incomplete. A local Venetian art lover is our source for this interesting snippet. Writing in his journal 15 years after Giorgione’s death, he reports that Titian stepped in to finish things off and make sure that Girolamo got the picture he’d ordered. He then lists the areas by Titian’s hand. These include much of the background, the fabrics underneath Venus, and a cupid at her feet. (The latter was long ago erased by a clumsy restoration effort.) In other words, the received wisdom is that the picture is not far off a fifty-fifty effort shared between two contemporaries.

This is seductive stuff. It unites two titanic talents of the Renaissance on a single canvas. It gratifies a desire identical to that of the football fan who’d give anything to watch a game where Messi and Maradona play in the same XI. Yet there really isn’t any reliable way of verifying the extent of Titian’s involvement. It’s all guesswork. Perhaps he contributed as much as that 16th century connoisseur claimed. It’s a good bet he did less though. For starters, there’s a holistic completeness to the way Venus, the landscape and the matrimonial message have all been integrated. It’s a powerful indication that a single mind was responsible for the design from start to finish, not a bit-by-bit committee. It would also be odd for Titian, if he was responsible for the background, to use nature as such an explicit mouthpiece. This was not his usual MO. And even where X-rays reveal adjustments made to the painting – there are a few – we’ve no overwhelming evidence they came from the brush of anyone other than Giorgione. We must remember, painters are allowed to alter course as they go. This happens so often, in fact, there’s a word for the tweaks and alterations: pentimenti. It’s a lovely sweet sounding tag for those dithering changes of mind, made all the better by its literal meaning: regrets.

Even so, the boffins will point to two subsequent works by Titian, each of which includes a portion of the landscape we can see in Giorgione’s painting. They think it’s unlikely Titian would’ve have repeated these passages in his own pictures if they weren’t originally of his invention. They suggest that having come up with the background imagery for the Sleeping Venus, Titian then recycled it. Partly because it was a good fit with what he was painting at the time, and partly because he wished to subtly lay claim to those elements of Giorgione’s picture that were his. It’s a neat proposition. But it assumes Titian was above the grotty business of borrowing the ideas of others. The truth is, like most formidable talents, the man was laid back about the practice. As we’re about to see, he lifted the reclining nude in the Sleeping Venus in her entirety. There’s no reason to suppose he didn’t do the same with the background. With Giorgione safely in the grave, it’s not as if he was going to receive a knock on the door and an earful of abuse.

There is one scenario, however, where we can be confident Titian’s involvement was more direct. This is a little technical, but bear with it. If the Sleeping Venus wasn’t quite finished when Giorgione died, it would have been without its final varnish. Patches of the painting would have ‘sunk in’. Sinking in is a process where colours lose their glossiness and strength. To a greater or lesser degree, it takes place all through an oil painting’s development. It can only really be stopped with a sturdy layer of varnish. Varnish, however, if used too early, can stuff up how the layers beneath bond to each other, increasing the chance of cracks appearing. It shouldn’t be applied before the painting is sufficiently dried, something which can take anywhere between 3 and 12 months from the last brushstroke. In the meantime, as colours gradually sink in and oxidise, some will turn matte or chalky and lose their lustre. They can end up looking like early stage preparatory layers, rather than the finished article. The rich variety of tone and temperature that’s essential if the image is to look lifelike and three dimensional won’t be there. More likely than not, Giorgione’s painting had a few areas like this when it arrived on Titian’s easel. Before he could varnish and deliver it to Girolamo, Titian would need to go over the trouble spots to check how far along they were when Giorgione died.

The standard solution to this complication, one which Titian undoubtedly used, is to ‘oil out’ the problem areas by brushing on sparse, diluted applications of the medium with which the paints were originally mixed. This generally brings everything roaring back to life. But sometimes it isn’t enough. If the paint isn’t thick enough, a few days later the colours may once again seem flat. The same can happen if the canvas beneath is just a touch too absorbent. When this happens, the next step is to make some subtle adjustments via ‘glazes’ and ‘scumbles’. Thin layers of fresh colour are laid semi-transparently over the old to lend tinting strength and to fine tune the overall appearance. (A glaze is a darker colour laid over a light one, whereas a scumble is the opposite.) This would also be the moment to tidy up any niggling loose ends which hadn’t been articulated fully: a pocket of grass here, a smear of cloud there, and so on. Then, once everything looked correct and the painting had a chance to dry, a satisfying, gloopy coat of varnish would have been brushed over the entire surface to keep the colours permanently glossy. In studios around the world, every day for the six hundred years oil paints have been widespread, realist artists have been busy playing this whack-a-mole game as their paintings enter the final furlong. It’s an unavoidable part of the process. The report we have of Titian’s hand roving all across the canvas fits perfectly with these late stage activities. It’s a far more plausible scenario than one where he painted half the picture from scratch.

Leaving behind questions of whose brush did what, one thing’s indisputable: Titian liked Giorgione’s naked female figure. A lot. And we can be 100% certain he knew exactly what she represented. (Venice was small enough that its arty crowd always had a good handle on each other’s ideas.) With Giorgione dead, what harm would there be if he lifted the man’s goddess and redeployed her wholesale into a painting of his own? There’d be none. So he did just that. Shamelessly. If we scale the two ladies in Photoshop and lay one over the other, they’re a near perfect match. There are some minor differences, of course: the twist of the body, the tilt of the head, the lie of the near arm, the presence of a right foot, and the outdoor versus indoor settings. In every other respect, each maps onto the other more or less exactly.

Yet a shared figure does not guarantee a shared concept. Titian may have known what Giorgione’s Venus stood for, but that doesn’t mean he wanted to address the same themes and paint a cosmic matriarch presiding over a marriage. He may just have wanted that body. The Pinups certainly think so. Remember that for them Titian’s nude is no goddess. She’s a reclining courtesan painted for a playboy prelate. They have on their side the letter which refers to her prosaically as the ‘naked woman’. It’s also worth pointing out that while Giorgione’s figure sleeps poetically, Titian’s actively eyes us up. She’s much more engaged in our world. It’s a feeling that’s reinforced by her domestic surroundings and the presence of flesh and blood people in the background. Given these differences, it would be foolish to take anything for granted. If we’re going to get on top of this, we’ll need to have a closer look at the canvas and see if Titian left any hints that might cast light on the identity of the woman before us.

It’d be understandable at this point to stride purposefully in the direction of some of the livelier details in the painting: the snoozing pooch on the right, or the flowers in the figure’s hand. But it’s probably best to start with the drape we can see behind the bed on the left. There was a tradition in Venetian painting of suspending a green - sometimes red – bolt of fabric behind very high-ranking or divine VIPs. This material was called the ‘cloth of honour’. It originated in the Middle Ages, when it was hung – in real life - above the thrones of monarchs, bishops and other lofty folk. Paintings that portrayed these people often followed suit, placing them in front of a richly coloured sheet of material. The custom quickly made its way into pictures of the Madonna. Spend a day or two traipsing through the museums of Venice, and you’ll spot cloths of honour dangling all over the place. In earlier paintings, they tend to be a bit formal and flat. Not to mention surreal; it can seem as if events in the picture are being monitored closely by an ironed tablecloth that just dropped in to see how everyone was doing. But as we move through the 1500s, cloths of honour become less orderly. They start to hang in swirling, curving folds. They have rhythm and movement. We can find both types across roughly thirty of Titian’s paintings. Not only those he did of the Virgin Mary, but also many of his pictures of dignitaries.

Of course, it’s possible Titian included the cloth purely to give his painting a tactile feel. Fabrics often serve this end in the artworks of the past. It’s also conceivable that he placed it there to save our eyes from the dreariness of the blank monolithic panel that lies behind. It may even be the case that those cool greens are meant to provide a temperature contrast with the nude’s warm flesh, highlighting how alive and sensuous she is. (Although a blue would do the job better.) But the green cloth of honour appears so often in Titian’s paintings it’d be rash to rule it out. There’s a good chance he wants us to view his naked lady as someone more elevated than a courtesan or any other run-of-the-mill woman. It’s something we’ll keep in mind as we move on.

If we let our eyes wander elsewhere, it’s natural to ask if there might be some significance to the jewellery we can see. Perhaps the small ring on the figure’s little finger has something to say. Could it be that the setting houses a bloodstone, a dark quartz that was thought to be able to staunch blood loss? If so, given its location, it would put wind in the sails of the Babymakers’ suggestions around pregnancy and childbirth. But there’s a problem with this idea. Titian, as a rule, festooned his subjects in trinkets. It wasn’t just the girls. Blokes got the decorative treatment too. Pope Julius II, for example, was painted with hands so heavily bejewelled even Mr. T would raise an eyebrow. For the most part, this need for ornamentation arose from the importance jewellery had for 16th century Italians. Everyone felt they ought to have some. In Venice, the appetite was so ravenous that those who couldn’t afford to buy any would rent it instead. This universal craving likely explains why we find dainty black rings adorning the little fingers of so many of Titian’s subjects. But they’re so indiscriminately sprinkled across his canvases and the women and men within them it’s impossible to alight on a consistent symbolic meaning. All we can confidently say is Titian painted with an eye for the fashions of his time.

We can make a similar call when it comes to the bracelet on the figure’s arm. The bracelet – or variants of it – can be found over and over again in Titian’s pictures. More often than not, it appears in mythological pieces where arms are bared. But at other times it can be found in more straightforward works. Aside from its ornamental value, it doesn’t appear to communicate anything. This is also the case with the pearl earring. Titian affixed pearl earrings to the women in his paintings so frequently that we soon lose count of them. It’s tempting to see them as a subtle allusion to Venus. The deity had been identified with pearls since ancient times, particularly in Rome, where Julius Caesar dedicated a pearl-crusted breastplate to the goddess. Yet with the passing of the years, the ancients began to see those shimmering drops of ghostly light less as the calling cards of a god and more as the baubles of choice for every fashion-minded woman with a few coins in her purse: candy for the wannabe Cleopatra. The same view was common in Venice. Pearls were a vital accessory for those who wanted to put their best foot forward. It’s no surprise, then, to find hardly a lady Titian painted didn’t have one hanging from a headdress or an earlobe. Apart from hitting the right à la mode notes, a bit of glitter could transform even the plainest girl into a siren. But a siren is not the same thing as a Venus.

Unless, that is, her pearls are combined with other things. It’s hard to miss the red roses the figure has in hand. These flowers have preoccupied the western mind for so long that they’ve come to signify all manner of stuff. They have sacred meanings in the Christian tradition, especially where the Virgin Mary pops up. But they also come stacked with classical connotations. Venus figures heavily here. When she was born, she emerged fully formed from a foaming sea. Wherever its froth spilt upon the shore, a white flower never before been seen grew from the soil. These were the first roses, as pale, beautiful and fragrant as Venus herself. If we revisit the story of the goddess and her lover, we find in some versions of the tale that as she ran to Adonis, she ripped her foot on their thorns. Her blood dyed the blooms crimson, giving us the red rose. More so than any other, this was the goddess’s flower. Titian lived at a time when these antique legends were well trod territory for the educated. He himself was steeped in them, as we can see from many pictures of his that delve into ancient myths. If he wanted to signal Venus’ presence, a combination of roses and a pearl was a great way to get the ball rolling. But it wasn’t the only calling card painted onto the canvas.

Most people pay next to no attention to the mattress on which Titian’s nude lies. It hardly merits a mention in the art-history books either. But look closely, and something familiar will emerge. All across the vermillion fabric there is a floral pattern. The bulk of it is indicated with washy black lines. But scattered here and there are faint yellow blossoms. These are the anemones we previously found in Giorgione’s picture of Venus. They’ve been located in the same area of the canvas too. This is hardly a coincidence. The clues don’t stop there though. At the back of the picture, sitting on a windowsill, a small, spherical piece of topiary emerges from a pot. To be honest, it’s a crude, lumpen piece of draughtsmanship with zero subtlety and even less artistry. Yet there’s no denying its importance. Every effort has been made to ensure its dark form stands out as strongly as possible against the pale sky and the flanking stonework. This can only be a miniature myrtle tree. Its twin stems and small, densely packed leaves are a giveaway. Since the ancients first wrote of their gods, this fragrant shrub was linked with Venus as solidly as the pyramids were with the pharaohs. It gets mentioned in countless stories of the goddess. It was planted around her shrines and temples. It was used in the rites and ceremonies that invoked her. And its association was well known to Titian’s generation.

On its own, any one of the roses, the anemones, the pearl, the cloth of honour or the myrtle tree would be a credible, if inconclusive, lead. Combine all five, however, and there can be no doubt. The picture that entered the home of Guidobaldo II della Rovere was definitely of Venus. Titian had followed Giorgione’s lead and gone with a goddess. So, how is it that over the years such a large number of experts have convinced themselves she’s a mortal centrefold? To be fair, a lot of the confusion is understandable. First of all, as we noticed before, there’s a directness to Titian’s Venus that seems more human than divine. But this is hazy, subjective stuff. More solid by far is the letter we encountered earlier in our story. Shortly after he’d decided to buy the Venus of Urbino, Guidobaldo sent written instructions to his go-between in Venice to collect from Titian the picture of the ’donna nuda’ (the naked woman). Those two words have since been taken as gospel by a certain breed of art historian, who – perversely, given the game they’re in – will always trust text before imagery. As far as they’re concerned, if Guidobaldo made no mention of Venus, who are we to think we know better? This was a man who spent time in Titian’s company while his portrait was done. No doubt, he spoke at length with the painter to while away the long hours. If he thought afterwards that the figure in the second painting he bought was a mere nameless nude, then that’s that.

Unhappily for the Pinups, evidence that bazookaed their theory clean out of the water came to light in 2011. An academic named Chriscinda Henry set herself the unenviable task of gauging how widespread prints were in 1500s Venice by digging through archives, wills and inventories. This may seem an unlikely furrow for our plough. But in the course of her research, Chriscinda discovered over 40 instances where a painting of an unclothed female was officially documented as a donna nuda. The list included nymphs, Cleopatras, courtesans and Venuses. It transpires the expression was a commonly used catch-all phrase. It could mean any type of nude at all, from the mortal to the divine. When Guidobaldo wrote the words in his letter, he was unquestionably using them in this sense, not as a verbatim ID badge. The Pinups, it turns out, have taken a loose descriptor far too literally.

Seeing as he was happy to borrow both the look and identity of Giorgione’s nude figure, it wouldn’t be unreasonable at this stage to suppose Titian pinched the theme as well. It’s a good bet his Venus is indicating to us with her hand her cosmic generative role. But we won’t be able to call it for certain until we’ve found out what’s going on with the rest of the painting. We need to focus on the background. It’s obvious something’s going on over there. But we won’t get to the bottom of it until we’ve figured out what those two ladies represent. Unfortunately, most commentators wander past this question with their intellectual curiosity idling close to zero RPM. The few who spare it a moment’s thought tend to give their chin a desultory scratch before half-heartedly declaring the pair to be servants who’ve just undressed - or are about to dress - the figure on the bed. Then, they trudge on and never again return. But there’s much more to the background than a domestic dressing scene. It can’t be disentangled with a quick glance though. Titian’s made it a little trickier than that. We’re going to need some help. Luckily, we can find it in the form of a chap called Lambert Sustris.

Lambert was a trusted assistant of Titian’s. Originally from Holland, he was taken on in the studio in the mid 1530s, around the time the Venus of Urbino was on the easel. Usually he was put to work on the landscape portion of pictures, freeing up Titian to concentrate on the flesh. But he was a capable all-rounder in his own right, and was well able to handle the human form when he chose. These talents were enough to make him a trusted collaborator. So much so that when Titian’s services were asked for at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Bavaria in the late 1540s, Lambert came with him. We’re looking at a long-standing professional relationship that involved a great deal of creative trust. For it to work as well as it did, it was vital the assistant knew his master’s mind. So, when we discover Lambert painted a second version of the Venus of Urbino, we should sit up and pay attention. We’re going to get an update on what Titian was attempting from someone who understood his artistic objectives better than anyone alive at the time, and certainly better than any of those who have written about the painting since.

If we take ourselves to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and amble through its soaring halls to Lambert’s Reclining Venus, we can get to work comparing the two pieces. The infamous hand may have retreated an inch or two from the trenches, but otherwise it’s clear Titian’s assistant was sticking closely to the original formula. A naked Venus stares out at us from her bed. She lies back with her weight on her right arm. Roses feature a second time. Although they’re now scattered around the white sheets that cover the bed rather than held in a posy. We also see the same green cloth of honour hanging against the same kind of dark panel. Once more, the background comprises a spacious room with tall windows, while expensive and expansive hangings descend from the ceiling to a foot or two above the floor. Beneath these lavish decorations, we find again the long, low cassoni chests we met with earlier. Even the myrtle tree makes a guest appearance. In most respects, the two pictures seem to be as closely matched as a pair of shoes.

There is one notable difference though. Lambert has placed six people in his background in stark contrast to Titian’s two. If you’ve any detective instincts at all, they should start tingling at the sight of these additions. Particularly when you notice the pair of young women from the Venus of Urbino have been carried over. Just as in Titian’s painting, one of them has a dress slung over her shoulder, while the other rummages about within a marriage chest. This is good news. It means the theme of the picture must be very close to Titian’s. What we find on this canvas will likely apply to the other. But what of the four new characters we can see? Why are they here? The most plausible explanation is that Lambert felt the meaning of Titian’s background scene wasn’t quite clear enough. One or two extra narrative shunts were needed to heave it over the line. We’d better see if we can put the jigsaw pieces together.

 The most easily read people in Lambert’s background are the couple facing away from us at the rear of the canvas. The chap is snappily dressed in a red doublet and hose with hints of a rich golden pattern. A black felt hat sits on his head at a natty angle. Strapped across the small of his back we can make out a long bladed rondel dagger; a popular piece of kit amongst active types. This is a fashionable fellow. And he’s been drinking. An empty wine glass is just about visible at the foot of the column to his left. Perhaps this is what’s given him the courage to chance an arm across the young woman’s shoulder. She seems relaxed about the gesture. She shares the moment with him as they both lean against the stone parapet and contemplate the world beyond. It’s pretty clear we’re looking at a scene of blooming romance. Moving back into the room, we encounter a lady at a virginal (a compact version of a harpsichord). Her purpose is a little less obvious. But the child beside her is a help. Well bred children in well heeled families were supposed to be well educated. Music was an essential and civilising part of that education. It seems likely, then, this is a mum playing for her kid’s benefit. Perhaps she plays the accompaniment to a courtly dance. Or maybe she’s teaching her child to sing. In either case, what we’re shown is a representation of parenting.

Then we arrive at the two young women at the open chest. We know the duo are a vital component in the composition. Unlike the others we’ve inspected, they’re included in both paintings. But it’s not at all clear what they stand for. We have to look closer. When we do, something starts to emerge. Throughout his version of the picture, Lambert’s freely made minor changes from Titian’s original. He’s added new people and brought his own touch to proceedings. Yet when he comes to the young lady who’s digging around in the chest, he moves into perfect lockstep. He paints her so that she’s almost identical to Titian’s kneeling girl, albeit viewed from a different angle. The posture, the hair, the activity. He hardly deviates an inch.

Clearly, Lambert felt there was something about the way his master presented this girl which was important. She had to remain the same, even if other elements of the picture like the standing maid were adjusted. And the major feature common to both paintings is the dress she wears. There are two things about it that catch the eye. The first is the puffed and padded style of the shoulders. This was a recent and fashionable adjustment to the way upper crust women in 1530s Italy dressed. It was also expensive. In Venice, there were sumptuary laws that heavily taxed any superfluous use of fabric in women’s clothes such as what we see here. So, it’s unlikely we’re looking at a servant girl, as has always been assumed. She’s more elevated than that. The second thing to note is the entire ensemble  – from shoulders to shoes – is snow white. But we should beware of the conclusion a modern mind might draw from this. The white wedding dress didn’t come into vogue until Victorian times. This outfit points to something more nuanced. We need to make a brief detour.

In all of Titian’s enormous output, we find only one other person dressed exclusively in white. In 1542, a few years after he’d finished the Venus of Urbino, Titian painted a three year old toddler called Clarissa Strozzi. Clarissa looks like the sort of girl who’d rather roll down grassy slopes and chase fireflies than pose for a formal portrait. But to brighten things up she has her favourite dog with her for company. And she’s managed to smuggle in a cheeky chunk of ciambelle bread to feed him. It’s clear Titian went to great lengths to capture the kind of unaffected charm that’s so unique to small children. We can see it in the way Clarissa leans conspiratorially towards her dog. No doubt, the pair were collaborators in the plot to liberate the bread from the kitchen. The sense of a sweet and perfect little person is helped along by the pair of swans we can spot through the window in the distant woodland. In the literature of the time, swans, with their flawless white plumage, were often linked to purity. Hieroglyphica, a popular 1500s book on allegorical imagery, lists them as a symbol of the ‘candor animi’, or the innocent soul. By echoing the colour of the swans in the toddler’s dress, Titian doesn’t just suggest this quality in Clarissa, he wraps her in it.

In an age where children weren’t seen as sentimentally as today, Titian was swimming against the tide. Renaissance painters usually presented kids as mini adults, just a few inches shy of marching out and taking their place in the grime and grind of the grown up world. But Titian saw something else. Something immaculate and pure. Perhaps this was because in the 1530s his daughter, Lavinia, was born, and, like many dads, he found himself ambushed by an overwhelming tenderness towards the very young. Perhaps not. Whatever the motivation, there’s no doubt he’s asking us – via that white dress - to notice a form of innocence untouched by adulthood. Could it be he was riffing on a related theme when he painted the white kneeling girl a few years before in the Venus of Urbino? The more we think about it, the more it starts to make sense. To understand why, we’ll return to Lambert’s background.

We’ve already noted how two of the figures in Lambert’s picture can be connected with romantic attachment and two with bringing up a child. We’ve also spotted the cassoni chests, which we know refer to marriage. Love, matrimony, parenting. When capped off with the presence of Venus, these are sure signs of – here’s that word again – an epithalamic theme. Lambert’s painted a conceptual map of a young woman’s life going in all the right directions. But before any of these things can happen, a girl must first leave behind her infancy and step into the adult world. This is what the figure at the chest is doing. She’s unpacking the dress of a grown woman so as to replace the white mantle of childhood. She’s exchanging her innocence for worldliness. She’s coming of age. ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ The words of Saint Paul seem an apt summary. And just in case there’s any doubt, Lambert’s made sure to place the kneeling girl in profile – something Titian did not. Thanks to that touch, we can tell she’s in her early teens. She’s at the age when a young 16th century lady would cross the bridge between the juvenile and the mature. The woman who stands beside her is a maid. She stiffens the message we found in the puffy shoulders of the dress, broadcasting her mistress’s high station. The same goes for that huge expanse of pricey wall hangings. This is no shopkeeper’s daughter, rummaging alone through a box. She’s someone of consequence. If she needs to get into her chest, others will attend her while she does it.

If a trusted assistant of Titian’s thought these were the ideas represented by the kneeling girl in the Venus of Urbino, it would fit well with what we’ve found elsewhere. We know that when Guidobaldo della Rovere bought the picture from Titian, he’d been married to his young wife, Giulia, for a couple of years. But because she was barely an adolescent when they tied the knot, key marital activities had been struck indefinitely from the menu. The consummation of the relationship would only happen when Giulia passed properly out of childhood. It cannot be a coincidence that the background scene in the painting shows us a girl taking exactly that step. It seems Titian was speaking very precisely and deliberately of a new chapter in the della Rovere marriage. And he didn’t even need Giulia to pose in order to pull it off. By presenting us with a back-view of her, the only thing he needed to know was the colour of her hair, something Guidobaldo could supply with a single word.

At this stage, it shouldn’t be beyond us to make a decent fist of reading the Venus of Urbino. Both visually and thematically it follows the Sleeping Venus closely. A goddess oversees the union of a man and a woman. Above her, a cloth of honour telegraphs her top-drawer status, much like the small bay tree we found in Giorgione’s painting. With her hand, Venus highlights that she’s a divine giver of life and points to the generative power  she will grant the couple.  Titian is at pains to stress this gesture. Look how he’s painted the edge of the dark panel and the top of the thigh so that they each terminate at the same point in the back of the hand. It’s a geometric contrivance slap bang in the horizontal centre of the painting. It’s like a 90 degree arrowhead pointing to the bullseye.

The goddess lolls on the marital divan. Here, through her, Giulia and Guidobaldo will at last come together as one. The anemones dotted across the mattress speak of the love the pair will share. In a sense, they will lie in a bed made of it. At the same time, the blossoms are a memento of the couple’s mortality. They’re a poetic reminder that love and devotion are forever on a collision course with tragedy. In the background, Giulia makes the leap into womanhood, fishing from her marriage chest an outfit to replace the innocence of childhood. She’s ready to become a fully fledged wife now. The solitary rose that’s detached itself and fallen from Venus’ posy is likely a play on the word deflorare (to deflower). It’s a cipher for the looming loss of Giulia’s virginity. (Titian used the same motif in one of his six paintings of the mythical Danaë at the moment when she loses her maidenhood to Zeus.) Appropriately, it falls onto the bed where she’ll embrace her husband. Although it looks like they might have some company there.

Everyone eventually notices the pint sized spaniel snoozing by Venus’ feet. Venetian artists were avid dog lovers. Their paintings were full of them. Titian was as enthusiastic as anyone else. Around 15 of his pictures contained a pooch of one type or another. Red and white Papillon dogs were a frequent favourite. But before we explore how this one fits into the overall theme, it’s worth recounting an utterly bananas theory that’s been foisted onto the little mutt. It goes like this. Somewhere around 1537, Titian did a portrait of Guidobaldo’s mother, Eleonora. On the left hand side of the canvas, on a table, a dog lies curled up beside the duchess. So far, so mundane. Because that dog looks similar to the one at Venus’ feet, however, it’s been suggested it’s the same animal in each painting. From here, it’s a short if spectacular leap to the conclusion the sitter must be the same too. The theory is helped along by a vague (very vague) resemblance between the women in the two pictures. Et voila! The model for the Venus of Urbino is revealed as Eleonora Gonzaga Duchess of Urbino, widow of Francesco Maria della Rovere Duke of Urbino, the  Supreme Commander of the Holy League.

This is a scandalous scenario. It implies one of the most stately and aristocratic matriarchs of the age scampered naked into Titian’s studio in her mid forties to moonlight as a goddess, and spent a good deal of her time there with a hand between her legs. It also has her wholly unbothered by her son’s decision to seize on the finished picture and carry it off to – of all places - the bedroom he shared with his wife.  And what does it say of Guidobaldo? Here was a man prepared to pay top dollar to have his mother hanging round naked where he slept; the proud owner of a shiny new oil painting and an unusually severe Oedipal complex. It’s a theory that has everything a subversive could wish for. It doesn’t stack up though. While they’re similar, the dogs aren’t identical. (Compare their left ears.) The same goes for the two women. The spaniel in the Venus of Urbino isn’t an inadvertant tip-off that unmasks a patrician model. It’s an emblem of marital devotion. A quick flick through the dictionaries of symbolism that did the rounds during the Renaissance settles the matter. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia and Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata both speak of dogs as an epitome of loyalty and fidelity. It’s an ancient association that’s still with us today. And it fits well with what’s going on in the rest of the picture. Little Fido represents the trust that’s vital to a good marriage. He’s located in the bed rather than the background because it’s here that fidelity matters most. Perhaps it’s an accident of design, but it’s interesting to note how Giulia’s connected to him via a strip of pale floor tiles which emerge from between her legs.

What about Guidobaldo? Where’s he in all of this? When we stop to think, it’s obvious. Venus looks straight at him. He’s us. Or rather, we’re him: the real-life man who bought the picture and stood before it every day. If this sounds like a stretch - like a piece of flimsy, artsy-fartsy conjecture - consider Titian’s other full length nudes. He painted dozens of them over the course of his life. The Venus of Urbino is the only one which stares out at us. The rest gaze at something contained within the picture. With good reason too. Every realist painter knows that eye contact is  powerful stuff. It connects the viewer and subject in a way nothing else can. These days, we use it on our canvases without a second thought. Things were different for Titian’s generation though. Theirs was an age uncluttered by photography. They hadn’t been bombarded by bared bodies as we have. For them, if the clothes were off, a direct stare could be so candid it was almost indecent. They had to tread with caution. That’s not to say some didn’t throw it to the wind. But not Titian. He was an artist with impeccable judgement. Overloading the visual circuitry was something  for lesser talents. Yet just this once, he made an exception and ran the risk. He had to. Without a fully charged dose of eye contact, the painting would never persuade Guidobaldo that he, like his young wife in the background, was connected to events within it. He’d be a witness, not a participant. To avoid this tepid outcome, a direct stare was a must. Then, with that minimum met, some other tricks could be deployed.

Chief amongst these is the way the painting’s been designed to make Venus seem physically close to the viewer. She’s right at the front of the picture, not recessed a foot or two further back. She’s also perched on the edge of the mattress. It’s as if she’s just done a half roll towards us. At any moment, she could tumble out of the canvas and into our lap. On its own, this isn’t much to write home about. A lot of paintings are set up along similar lines. But here, the sense of proximity is strengthened by the dark wooden panel that’s been dropped in to divide the picture in two. Titian loved using this device. Go through his catalogue and you’ll soon lose track of how often a big vertical surface blocks off one side of the background. Particularly in his portraits. Sometimes it’s a straight hanging cloth of honour. On other occasions it’s the edge of a stone window, a projecting pilaster, or just a wall. The effect is always the same though. It makes us feel we’re confined with the painted person before us in a shared moment of stillness, while further beyond, the world gets on with its business - we two alone in here; the rest out there. It fosters a sense of connection. In the Venus of Urbino, Titian ramps the stratagem up to the max. He has the panel take up half the canvas, and keeps it so dark it feels as if we’re inside a box with Venus. Standing in front of the picture in the quiet, heavy hours of night with a candle for illumination, who wouldn’t feel the hair-prickling presence of the goddess as her gleaming form and gaze shimmered out of the shadows?

The final ploy used to make Guidobaldo feel at one with the canvas involved the background. Most of Titian’s pictures of mythological people came with a mythological setting. At the very least, the surroundings went beyond humdrum reality and suggested a poetic location. The Venus of Urbino, however, was set in a contemporary home. It’s large and grand. But there’s no mistaking that whiff of the household. Titian hadn’t done something like this before. Nor would he again. Why did he ditch the habits of a lifetime and go for a busy domestic scene? The answer’s straightforward. He needed the setting to map onto the kind of environment a young, contemporary couple would inhabit. He didn’t want a situation where, like the Pevensie children toppling out of the wardrobe into Narnia, Guidobaldo and Giulia were transported into a fantastical land each time they looked at the picture. He wanted to keep everything relatable. Done right, it’d make the painting more convincing, more powerful and more appropriate. It was yet another clever stroke on a canvas that bursts with accomplishment.

So far as its meaning goes, we’ve travelled as deep as we can into this truly remarkable artwork. It’s been a lengthy journey. But we had to get a handle on how Venus was understood in the literature of the time before we could progress. We also needed to have a good grasp of the Sleeping Venus. Getting stuck into Titian’s painting without spending some time on Giorgione’s would’ve been no different from explaining tonic without a mention of gin. Possible but pointless. Titian owes his peer an enormous creative debt. Although that doesn’t diminish what he achieved in any way. The Venus of Urbino is a magnificent epithalamic painting filled with subtle cues and clever bits of design. It’s staggeringly beautiful. It’s a triumph. Well . . . almost.

 After our efforts to unlock his masterpiece, it may seem strange to start finding fault with some of what Titian did. But we must. We’ve already spotted how crude the myrtle tree is. And that’s before we get to the wonky asymmetry of the blob beneath that’s supposed to be a pot. It’s a really poor piece of painting. In fact, it’s so atrocious the Scottish engraver, Robert Strange, while etching a copy of the Venus of Urbino in 1761, felt obliged to give it a full makeover. The representation of Giulia isn’t so hot either. Nowhere in that bland figure can we find the fingerprints of a master at work. Where are the bewitching rhythms that would add some interest to her bargain-basement outline? They’re just not there. The standing maid has issues too. Look how far to the right her rear extends. She has the face of a nymph and the backside of a Congolese gorilla. Of course, a good case can be made for a chunk of her form deriving from the dress hanging in shadow from her shoulder. Even so, it’s the sort of clumsy optical mess a top painter will generally avoid. At the very least, they’d distinguish one feature from the other a little better.

When art historians spot weakness like these in a big-name painting, their first instinct is to pin it on the assistants: the forgotten dogsbodies attached to every great painter. These were the people who shuffled through all the menial, filthy tasks vital to the running of a successful studio. In exchange for their efforts, the underlings were allowed to learn from the master. That means every now and then, we’ll find bits of their handiwork in the midst of a drop-dead masterpiece. Somewhere in the background or in a peripheral passage, we’ll spot a sudden lack of polish, or a slight swerve in style. It’s rare, however, we see problems with basic shapes, as we can here. No assistant would’ve been allowed near a major studio project unless their core drawing skills were top notch. And we can tell they were at that standard amongst Titian’s crew. Let’s go back to Lambert for a moment. He wasn’t half the painter his master was. Yet look at the myrtle tree he put together in his Reclining Venus. It may not be brilliant. But it is at least elegant and interesting. It’s certainly well ahead of what we find on the boss’s canvas: a lopsided blotch topped with a wishy-washy pom-pom. Whatever it is that’s gone wrong back there, we can’t blame it on the help. What about Titian?

There’s a famously bitchy anecdote which runs down Titian’s ability to draw. In 1546 while he was in Rome working on a couple of paintings for some buyers, he received a visit from Michelangelo. After the two had parted,  Michelangelo – never a chap to let a gloomy opinion go unexpressed - remarked to a companion that Titian’s work had a lot going for it. The manner and colouring were excellent. But the poor fellow couldn’t draw for toffee. Unfortunately for Titian, that companion of Michelangelo’s was Vasari, the most important biographer in art history. He knew a juicy anecdote when he heard it. The criticism went straight into his book, and has been doing the rounds ever since. We can sort of see where it came from too. As he entered middle age, Titian lost interest in the clear, rhythmic lines that obsessed men like Michelangelo. He started to create his forms by arranging whispery fields of atmospheric colour, the contours of which dissolve into each other. These two styles – one representing Florence and disegno (drawing), the other Venice and colore (colour) – are usually described as if they were mortal enemies. And in some fussy ways they are. But the characterisation of Titian as a bit cack-handed when it came to draughtsmanship isn’t fair. He was extremely capable when he wanted to be. Particularly when he was younger. We can see it both in his drawings and his earlier paintings. We can also see it in the Venus we’ve spent so much time trying to understand. She’s superbly drawn. The problems in the background of the painting may not be the fault of Titian’s apprentices, but they’re not down to a gap in Titian’s abilities either. Something else has happened.

The most likely explanation is that these elements were fired onto the canvas, warts and all, at breakneck speed. Then, before there could be a period of rumination and adjustment, the picture had to be varnished and made ready to travel. Titian had run up against a deadline. One that arrived suddenly, and left him no time to get things right. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask how this could happen with a piece that hung around the studio for six years. Michelangelo managed the 6000 square feet of the Sistine ceiling in less than five. But, as we noted earlier, Titian would often put an unfinished work aside for a long interval. After the death of Ippolito de Medici, this was probably the fate of the incomplete painting. The piece was resumed only a couple of years later, in February of 1538, when Guidobaldo decided he had to have it. We also know the young man wanted to take possession as soon as possible. In correspondence he sent to both his agent in Venice and to his mother, his impatience was palpable. On March 9th he wrote of his intention to send a servant to pick the picture up, even though he had yet to pay for it. The timing of that note is interesting. While there’s some confusion about the year in which she was born (either 1523 or 1524), we know Giulia’s birthday fell at the end of March. It seems Guidobaldo was doing his best to get the painting to his house just in time for his wife turning 14 or 15. It’s not difficult to guess what was on his mind. With such an immovable date looming, and Guidobaldo pushing hard, Titian was under pressure to deliver. He wouldn’t be the last great painter to leave behind a few substandard touches when in a rush.

The problems we find on the finished canvas aren’t limited to some underwhelming drawing though. We can see signs of a blitzed job elsewhere too. The embroidered anemones scattered across the red mattress are instructive. All but a few have flaked off and disappeared, a sure sign that risks were taken on a technical level. Most likely, Titian - in an effort to speed up their drying time - mixed the lead-tin yellow he was using for the flowers with an excess of oil-drying siccative like zinc sulphate. Strong-arming the chemistry in this way was too much for the pigment. The bond it formed with the layer beneath was never better than fragile. The petals left the studio as hostages to fortune. As in many hostage situations, some didn’t make it.

We haven’t yet accounted for the role played by the painting’s origins in all of these flaws. It began as a project intended for Ippolito de Medici: a cardinal with zero prospects of marriage. Precious little of what we’ve found within the picture would ever apply to him. So, what was Titian’s thinking as he commenced the painting six years before? It’s hard to know. The most probable starting point though, is one where Ippolito had seen or heard of Giorgione’s beguiling Venus and voiced some admiration for the piece. Or at least, the naked body within it. (Being in a private house was no barrier to fame when it came to first-rate paintings.) Titian - keen to give himself every advantage he could - decided to use it as a template. He made a slick call with the choice of Angela Zaffetta to model the goddess, something that was sure to please Ippolito. He also woke the figure from sleep and opened her eyes: the risqué plan to embrace the onlooker with a direct stare was first hatched with the cardinal in mind. But before Titian could paint in a background that tied together the goddess, the glance and the high risk hand in a way that was appropriate for a churchman, Ippolito was murdered. The painting was abandoned against a wall of the studio. For a couple of years, it remained there. A bare body floating on a bare canvas, unanchored and yet to receive a proper context.

Then, once the dust had a chance to gather, Guidobaldo walked through the door. The painting was spotted. Conversations were had. Titian learned how his patron’s young bride was about to come of age. Suddenly, it was obvious how the picture might be finished. An epithalamic composition arranged around the mother of all. A rehashing of Giorgione’s painting. Not merely in appearance – as was the case for Ippolito - but in theme as well. Guidobaldo relished the idea. He pledged cash. But the picture had to be ready ASAP. The new chapter which was afoot in the della Rovere household had an immovable launch date. Tempus fugit. Titian got to work, filling in the blanks one by one, moving faster and faster. Guidobaldo breathed down his neck. The pace became untenable. The mistakes appeared. And then, almost as quickly as the deal had been struck, it was time to varnish (prematurely) and ready the painting for travel. What was done was done.

In spite of the shortcomings, there’s no doubt in its prime this was a picture of thermo-nuclear radiance. The soft damage that comes as standard after 500 years and a few restorations has made it trickier to appreciate. But we can still make out (just) some of the luminous clarity that was worked into the body of Venus. This was an image intended to breathe. For the most part, that effect was achieved through a supernatural balance of cool greys and warm reds arranged around an expanse of neutral flesh. These hot and cold variations of colour temperature are vital if an image is going to look lifelike. They lend it a visual credibility. One that even a camera will struggle to achieve. The usual routine in cool light - such as we see in this interior scene - is to use colder colours in those areas which are well illuminated. Then, as a surface moves away from light and into shadow, the temperature should be heated up. It’s one of the many yin-yangs that govern competent realist painting. And it’s all reversed if you move outside into the more warmly lit realm of landscape painters. In either case, the game isn’t played out solely amongst the lightest lights and darkest darks. It applies to all the tones, half tones and fractional tones in between. If it’s done right, the interaction between cool light and warm shadow will fuse into something tremendously powerful. The image will seem to vibrate with life. If we look at the lower half of Venus’ left leg, we find a great example of Titian hunting down this effect. Look at how the shaded underside of her foot is a hot red, while the well lit contour of her shin is a chillier grey.

At first, this formula may seem relatively easy to operate. But, as with any kind of technical rule, there will always be moments when it has to be broken. If, for example, a patch of the model is bathed in cool light, but the natural skin colour of that area is particularly warm, the warmth must be allowed to win out, even if only slightly. (Look at the gentle heat describing the knee just above the grey shin.) Then, there are the complications which arise when light bounces off a cool surface into an area of warm shadow. We can see this along the bottom of Venus’ right thigh. Where it curls away from the light and down to the sheet, we’d expect the shadow area to be warm. But it’s not. That’s because the white sheet is reflecting cool light upwards. As we get closer to the hip, however, things change and the shadow on the flesh is suddenly reversed to hot. That’s because the portion of sheet immediately below is itself in slight shadow. Its capacity to reflect is lessened. Finally, there are difficult decisions to make when a surface ends in an abrupt edge rather than turning gradually away. Look at the contour of Venus’ right upper arm. There’s a warm edge where it meets her hair, a cold edge where it meets the pillows, then an extremely warm edge as the elbow sinks down into the surrounding shadows. We could go deeper into this. A lot deeper. But you probably get the idea. Temperature management is a minefield. Making accurate calls can be horrendously tricky. Especially with a complex form like this. A naked body has more variety and directional twists than almost anything else we can conceive of. Just one or two lacklustre decisions can undermine its lifelike appearance, knocking the painting back from extraordinary (museum standard) to merely very good (oligarch’s Swiss warehouse collection). Titian has nothing to worry about though. All across Venus’ body, he dishes out a master class in how to get it right. His skill and judgement are phenomenal.

Clever temperatures alone will not a goddess make though. More is needed besides. Titian’s put a huge effort into the texture of Venus’ flesh. It’s a species of silk. If we took a pipette and squeezed a single drop of water onto Venus’ clavicle, it would roll uninterrupted to the tip of her toe. Such smoothness in a steeply undulating figure can never happen without world class brushwork. There’s no room for self-indulgent choppy strokes that stand out nicely and advertise how lovely the paint is. Everything has been subordinated to a higher end, to an alchemical miracle, to the reality-bending illusion of taut, turning, touchable skin.  That polished finish is much more challenging on a canvas which, like this one, has a rougher weave. The potential for error is high. Yet from one end of the  tightrope to the other, Titian never puts a foot wrong. The result is breathtaking. We can only imagine how lifelike and convincing that body must have been when it was fresh off the easel half a millennium ago.

If they paused to think things through, the Pinups’ camp would quickly realise it’s this arresting vividness – much more than a hand or a stare - that gives the picture the vibe they’re so keen to peg as sexual. They struggle to separate the sensuous from the sensual. Admittedly, with a painting like this, it’s easy to mix the two up. Titian doesn’t seem to have been too fussed by the distinction himself. There’s no way he crafted that bare body, all the while blind to its voluptuous power. And he was too shrewd to imagine it was a quality that wouldn’t figure in the reckoning of men like Ippolito and Guidobaldo. But it was a natural side effect of his quest to make Venus as real as he possibly could. Besides, the picture has a seriousness to it which simply wouldn’t be there if Titian was entirely preoccupied by matters sexual. It may have less symbolism than the average allegorical work. Some of its messages may be a little garbled. But it’s more – much more – than the lurid centrefold Mark Twain poked fun at. It’s a hymn sung for a young couple setting out together. It’s a humanist plea for their fulfilment. It’s an invocation of hope.

Ordinarily, this would be a good point to stop. Yet it wouldn’t be right to finish up without quickly casting an eye over some of the events that took place after the painting’s completion. Although it seems Guidobaldo was determined to have the piece by the time of Giulia’s birthday, it sat in Titian’s studio – ready to depart at a moment’s notice - while the youth scrambled about for the necessary cash. This took longer than expected and involved begging letters to his mum. But Eleonora’s interest in the naked goddess didn’t burn as bright as her son’s. Her co-operation was decidedly half-hearted. It was May at the earliest before accounts were settled and the painting trundled off in a cart for the della Rovere household. The great rush, it turns out, wasn’t necessary.

As for Giulia and Guidobaldo, things didn’t go so well. If we’re honest, they hadn’t started on a great footing either. Guidobaldo had been forced at gunpoint to marry his child-bride by his demented father, Francesco. Francesco was famously terrifying. Before he was 22, he’d twice stabbed someone to death in the course of an argument. As he grew older, the volcanic eruptions were helped along by an assortment of unsavoury diseases, venereal and otherwise. Contemporaries joked that it wasn’t wise to approach the man without first assessing his humour from a safe distance with astrological instruments. This was not a chap to be trifled with. When he commanded his son to marry Giulia and further the family’s political prospects, he expected obedience. Incredibly, Guidobaldo dug his heels in. He wanted his wife to be a woman he loved; in this case, a girl he trysted with called Clarice Orsini. Where love leads, the young must follow, and all that.

Francesco was apoplectic. He’d already made his opinion of the affair clear sometime before, when he hanged a family maid for carrying communications between the lovers. But this prudent measure hadn’t dampened Guidobaldo’s feelings. A series of letters were exchanged between father and son in an effort to sort things out. Francesco damned Clarice’s family as a lowborn rabble (they weren’t) and accused one of them of being a universally recognised madman (here, he was undoubtedly projecting). Guidobaldo responded by scratching clumsily at his father’s obsession with pedigree, and called into question the origins of Giulia’s mum. Francesco, in a seething reply, didn’t bother to address this charge directly. Instead, he announced darkly he would do to Guidobaldo ‘something that no one has ever imagined a father might do to a son’ unless the marriage to Giulia went ahead. Things came to a head when Eleonora gave birth to a second son. Francesco latched instantly onto the leverage his wife had provided him with this event, and hinted that Guidobaldo could expect to see his baby brother scoop the family inheritance if he didn’t pull himself together. Here was a threat that hit home.

We’ve no notion what thoughts Giulia had of her fate. Not that an objection would’ve made one iota of difference. Just like her husband, the girl had to do as she was told. The two were married in an autumn wedding in 1534. Of course, in one sense, Giulia had merely entered a waiting room. One that she didn’t have to leave before the age of 14 or 15. But even with the act delayed, as one half of a dynastic alliance, she was fully committed to the production of a male heir. Unfortunately, this never happened. Giulia died at the age of 24. The only child she left behind was her three year old daughter, Virginia, a little girl who liked to sing. We’ve no idea why her life was cut so wretchedly short. But it’s not as if the 16th century couldn’t supply plenty of exit routes.

In 1999, during renovations in the monastery of Santa Chiara in Urbino, where Giulia had been laid to rest, her body was disinterred from the family crypt. As a result, we know she was around 5 foot 3 inches. Not far off the frame of the young lady we see in the picture. In one of those spine-tingling twists of fate, her funeral dress was taken from her body and removed to the local museum. The girl who picked out the garments of a new life in one of the world’s most famous paintings was ultimately stripped of them. It just doesn’t seem right.

Things worked out only a little better for Guidobaldo. After Giulia’s death, he wasted no time and married anew within the year. This time to the granddaughter of the pope. It seems it was a happy union. But six of the couple’s nine children perished before they could come of age. Worse, the family line and title lapsed forever with Guidobaldo’s solitary son, who died without an heir. It’s safe to say Titian’s splendid painting hadn’t delivered the epithalamic goods for anyone. It’s yellow anemones, with their intimations of love and mortality, were disturbingly close to the bone. As the della Rovere duchy came to an end, the picture was bundled up with other valuables and passed via the marriage of a stray granddaughter into the hands of the Medici family in Florence. It’s been in the town ever since.

As for Angela, we know she was still knocking about Venice ten years after the Venus of Urbino was finished. We have a letter written to her in 1548 from Pietro Aretino. He invited her round to dinner.  Titian and Jacopo Sansovino were going to be there. The Triumvirate of Taste and their shining muse. After that, her footprints dissolve into obscurity. There are rumours though. Pietro hints in his writing that she may have left courtesanship behind and moved onto other things. There are whispers of a child. There are even grounds to believe she’d taken on a grand house in the city, and passed untroubled into her future with a great deal of money in hand. Hopefully, one day, in a long forgotten ledger, a mildewed letter that sheds a happy light on her fate will be found. In the meantime, we can marvel at the young woman’s vitality by visiting her in the 83rd hall of the Uffizi gallery. The place is too brightly lit to mimic a 1500s marital chamber such as the one she hung in for many years. Nonetheless, if you’re there in the evening, and the gallery is falling quiet, you may be lucky enough to have a minute alone with her. That’s the  moment when she’ll seem most alive. Not as a girl, nor as a courtesan, but as a goddess. She’ll look you in the eye, and with that divine gaze will invite you towards a blessed bed full of promise and hope.