The reclining nude is a pose before it is a subject: a woman stretched across the canvas, shown to the viewer as a goddess, a mistress or a model. It began in Venice with Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, painted between 1507 and 1510 and now in Dresden, and every famous version since, from Titian to Manet to Modigliani, keeps the pose and changes what her eyes do.
Giorgione's goddess sleeps with one arm raised over her head and a hillside behind her. Titian painted her again in 1538 with her eyes open. Velázquez turned her around, Goya and Manet made her look back, and in 1917 a Paris police chief told a dealer to get rid of a show of nudes.
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The picture that started it was not finished by the man who began it. Giorgione painted the sleeping Venus, and Titian completed the canvas. In 1525 the Venetian writer Marcantonio Michiel saw it in the house of Girolamo Marcello, and his notes say that the landscape and the Cupid were Titian's.
There is no Cupid in the painting today, although X-rays show that a little god once sat beside her before he was painted over. The sleeper's pose has a doubtful origin too. Giorgione was not the first to lay a woman in this position, and the book that may have given it to him was printed in Venice only a few years earlier.
Over the following centuries each new version made someone angry, and the reason changed every time.
What You'll Discover
Where Giorgione found the pose.
What Titian's goddess does with her eyes.
Why Velázquez showed only her back.
What the Inquisition asked Goya.
What the pose cost Manet and Modigliani.