Venus of Urbino: The emancipation of a goddess
“What though the rose have prickles, yet ’tis pluck’d.”
― William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
Titian’s Venus of Urbino, an oil on canvas finished around 1535, is one of the first in a series of reclining Venuses. To be precise, it is the third known reclining Venus, with Titian also being credited with the first one, painted a couple of decades prior (the Sleeping Venus). Venus of Urbino is probably one of the most radical pieces of art ever created. The reason becomes clear with even a swift glance at the examples of reclining female nudes in Western art; this is the first depiction of a reclining female nude in a profane environment (preceding Goya’s Nude Maya by 250 years!). To be fair, the painting does have an element of mythological meaning — the most obvious being the fact that it’s a titular representation of the goddess Venus — but to what degree these elements are key to the overall representational structure of the painting is in the eye of the observer. And this is, probably, exactly what makes Titian’s Venus of Urbino such a tantalizing delight.
The two characteristics that immediately differentiate the Sleeping and the Urbino Venuses are the fact that the latter is no longer portrayed as an allegorical counterpart to an idyllic pastoral scene, and her being in a fully awakened state. More than…
