Venus of Urbino

Venus of Urbino
Artist	Titian
Year	1534 (1534)
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	119 cm × 165 cm (47 in × 65 in)
Location	Uffizi, Florence

The Venus of Urbino (also known as Reclining Venus)^[1] is an oil painting by Italian painter Titian, depicting a nude young woman, traditionally identified with the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance palace. Work on the painting seems to have begun anywhere from 1532 or 1534, and was perhaps completed in 1534, but not sold until 1538. It is currently held in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.

The figure's pose is based on the Dresden Venus, traditionally attributed to Giorgione but for which Titian at least completed the landscape. In his own painting, Titian has moved Venus to an indoor setting, engaged her with the viewer, and made her sensuality explicit; some even believe the figure is engaging in masturbation.^[2]

Interpretations of the painting fall into two groups; both agree that the painting has a powerful erotic charge, but beyond that, it is seen either as a portrait of a courtesan, perhaps Zaffetta, or as a painting celebrating the marriage of its first owner (who according to some may not have commissioned it). This disagreement forms part of a wider debate on the meaning of the mainly Venetian tradition of the reclining female nude, which Titian had created, or helped to create, some 25 years before with the Dresden Venus of around 1510–11. For Charles Hope, "It has yet to be shown that the most famous example of this genre, Titian's Venus of Urbino, is anything other than a representation of a beautiful nude woman on a bed, devoid of classical or even allegorical content."^[3] Even the indefatigable finder of allegories drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Edgar Wind, had to admit that in this case "an undisguised hedonism had at last dispelled the Platonic metaphors".^[4]