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The Venus of Urbino (1538) is an oil painting
Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil ? especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil....
 by the Italian master Titian
Titian

File:Tizian 090.jpg Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, born 1473/1490 , died 27 August 1576, better known as Titian , was the leading painter of the 16th-century Venice school of the Italian Renaissance....
. It depicts a nude young woman, identified with the goddess Venus
Venus (mythology)

Venus was a major Roman mythology goddess principally associated with love, beauty and sexual reproduction, the equivalent of the Greek mythology Aphrodite....
, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance
Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
 palace. It hangs in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence
Florence

Florence is the Capital city of the Italy Regions of Italy of Tuscany and of the provinces of Italy Province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany and has a population of 364,779 ....
. The figure's pose is based on Giorgione
Giorgione

Giorgione is the familiar name of Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, an Italy painter, a seminal artist of the High Renaissance in Venice....
's Sleeping Venus
Sleeping Venus (Giorgione)

The Sleeping Venus, also known as the Dresden Venus, is an extremely influential painting by the Italy Renaissance master Giorgione, with, it is now generally accepted, the landscape and sky, by Titian, completed after Giorgione's death in 1510, as Vasari first noted....
 (c. 1510); however, Titian uses more sensuality in comparison to Giorgione's remoteness. Devoid as it is of any classical or allegorical trappings ('Venus' displays none of the attributes of the goddess she is supposed to represent), the painting is unapologetically erotic.

The frankness of Venus' expression is often noted; she stares straight at the viewer, unconcerned with her nudity.






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The Venus of Urbino (1538) is an oil painting
Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil ? especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil....
 by the Italian master Titian
Titian

File:Tizian 090.jpg Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, born 1473/1490 , died 27 August 1576, better known as Titian , was the leading painter of the 16th-century Venice school of the Italian Renaissance....
. It depicts a nude young woman, identified with the goddess Venus
Venus (mythology)

Venus was a major Roman mythology goddess principally associated with love, beauty and sexual reproduction, the equivalent of the Greek mythology Aphrodite....
, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance
Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
 palace. It hangs in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence
Florence

Florence is the Capital city of the Italy Regions of Italy of Tuscany and of the provinces of Italy Province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany and has a population of 364,779 ....
. The figure's pose is based on Giorgione
Giorgione

Giorgione is the familiar name of Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, an Italy painter, a seminal artist of the High Renaissance in Venice....
's Sleeping Venus
Sleeping Venus (Giorgione)

The Sleeping Venus, also known as the Dresden Venus, is an extremely influential painting by the Italy Renaissance master Giorgione, with, it is now generally accepted, the landscape and sky, by Titian, completed after Giorgione's death in 1510, as Vasari first noted....
 (c. 1510); however, Titian uses more sensuality in comparison to Giorgione's remoteness. Devoid as it is of any classical or allegorical trappings ('Venus' displays none of the attributes of the goddess she is supposed to represent), the painting is unapologetically erotic.

The frankness of Venus' expression is often noted; she stares straight at the viewer, unconcerned with her nudity. In her right hand she holds a posy of flowers whilst her left covers her vulva
Vulva

The vulva refers to the external sex organ of the female. In colloquial speech, the term vagina is often used to refer to the female genitals generally, although, strictly speaking, the vagina is a specific internal structure, whereas the vulva is the whole exterior genitalia....
, provocatively placed in the centre of the composition. In the near background a dog, symbolizing fidelity
Fidelity

Fidelity is a notion that at its most abstract level implies a truthful connection to a source or sources. Its original meaning dealt with loyalty and attentiveness to one's duty to a lord or a monarch, in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty....
, is asleep.The image of a dog usually symbolizes faithfulness, and the fact that it is asleep hints that the woman portrayed is unfaithful.
Venus Dormida
Manet, Edouard Olympia, 1863
The painting was commissioned by Guidobaldo II della Rovere
Guidobaldo II della Rovere

Guidobaldo II della Rovere was an Italy condottiero, who was Duke of Urbino from 1539 until his death....
, the Duke of Urbino
Urbino

Urbino is a walled city in the Marche region in Italy, south-west of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444 to 1482....
. It would originally have decorated a cassone
Cassone

Among furniture in Italy, a cassone is a rich and showy type of Chest , which may be inlaid or carved, prepared with gesso ground then painted and gilded....
, a chest traditionally given in Italy
Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
 as a wedding present. The maids in the background are shown rummaging through a similar chest, apparently in search of the Venus's clothes. Curiously, given its overtly erotic content, the painting was intended as an instructive 'model' for Giulia Varano, the Duke's extremely young bride. The argument for the painting's didacticism was made by the late art historian Rona Goffen in 1997's “Sex, Space, and Social History in Titian’s Venus of Urbino".

In his 1880 travelogue
Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing of literature value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author tourism a place for the pleasure of travel....
 A Tramp Abroad
A Tramp Abroad

A Tramp Abroad is a work of non-fiction travel literature by United States author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris , through central and southern Europe....
, Mark Twain
Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an United Statesmerican author and humorist. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer....
 called the Venus of Urbino "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses". He proposed that "it was painted for a bagnio
Bagnio

A Bagnio was originally a bathing or Public bathing.The term was then used to name the prison for hostages in Istanbul, which was near the bath-house, and thereafter all the slavery prisons in the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary regencies....
, and it was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong", adding humorously that "in truth, it is a trifle too strong for any place but a public art gallery".

Venus of Urbino inspired the later painting Olympia
Olympia (painting)

Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by ?douard Manet in the Realism style. Painted in 1863, it measures 130.5 by 190 centimetres . The nation of France acquired the painting in 1890 with a public subscription organized by Claude Monet....
 by Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet

?douard Manet , 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883, was a French Painting. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from realism to Impressionism....
, in which the figure of Venus was replaced with a prostitute.

This work of art was an inspiration for the character Fiammetta Bianchini in the book In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant.

External links

  • - critical review of the painting