Titian's Venus of Urbino, painted in 1538, shows a young woman lying naked on a bed in a Venetian house, one hand between her legs, her eyes on whoever stands in front of her. Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere of Urbino bought it, and it most likely shows a bride being prepared for her wedding.
Behind her, two maids dig through a chest for a dress. At her feet, a small dog sleeps. There is no cloud, no cupid, nothing that says goddess.
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The nudity did not bother the American writer Mark Twain. In 1880, in his travel book A Tramp Abroad, he described the Tribuna, the little room of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence where she hung, and called her "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses."
Then he ruled out the obvious. "It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed," Twain wrote. "No, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand." Visitors stole glances all the same, he noted: young girls furtively, young men "long and absorbedly."
Twain was right to look at that hand. What he could not know is what it was doing in a picture a duke had bought from Titian, the leading painter of Venice.
The name the duke gave her
The duke did not call her Venus. In 1538, Guidobaldo wrote to his agent in Venice, Girolamo Fantini, and asked him not to leave the city without two paintings: a portrait of the duke and "la donna nuda," the nude woman. He gave her no other name.
Nothing in his letter says why he wanted it.
The name Venus came from a visitor. In 1548, the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari saw the picture in the duke's wardrobe and described "a young recumbent Venus with flowers and certain fine draperies about her." Roses are an emblem of Venus, and so is the myrtle plant on the windowsill.
The picture stayed with the della Rovere family until Vittoria della Rovere, a descendant of the duke, married Ferdinando II de' Medici, the ruler of Florence, and brought it there as part of her dowry. The painter Johan Zoffany's group portrait of the Uffizi's Tribuna, painted in the 1770s, shows it in a place of honor.
Titian did not invent the hand Twain objected to.
What You'll Discover
What her hand is doing.
Why two maids raid a chest.
What the dog and the roses promise.
Who she is looking at.
What Manet took from her.