Titian, Venus of Urbino

[Music] we're in the feed scene we're looking at one of the great Tisch ins the venetian master who it's painted here an image which is often referred to as the Venus of Urbino which is a title that the painting acquired later in its life so we don't really know who she is right and there's not much to convey the idea that she's a Venus except that she's nude it seems to be a protective title that makes it acceptable subject matter which was often the case in the history of art after this but one could look at image of a nude woman and think about ideas of beauty say from a sense of improper looking by understanding the figure is Venus instead of a nude woman but it's clear that whoever she is this is a painting that's about sensuality it's about this sort of the beauty of the physical she is gazing directly at us or the coyness and the correctness that it is and the way that her long silky hair frames her breasts and the way that she holds the flowers near her skin and the sensuality of the sheet and the couch it feels like a very sensual environment but mostly the sensuality I think emerges because of the incredible softness that we sense from the paint so Titian is a Venetian as we mentioned he's coming out of this extraordinarily rich tradition and thinking about the work of Bellini and the way in which these are is borrowed from actually the painting of Flanders and brought oil-paint to Italy and began to experiment in very sophisticated ways with glazing creating of softness as you said but a richness of color and a visual sensuality which is a perfect vehicle for the sensuality of the subject matter here and by glazing we're talking about a specific way of applying the paint where the artist applies very thin layers of oil paint that are almost translucent one on top of the other Titian was supposed to have painted up to 10 to 15 layers of pay and so the figure glows and there's a softness her outlines and in the modeling that enhances that sensuality as he said magicians use of cute escorter in combination with that glazing in the softness has created this real sense of her flesh it is so central to this painting we have also Titian setting up this tradition of the reclining nude that will be a given for virtually the rest of Western art history we can certainly think of MANET and lots of people in between she is creating a kind of soft diagonal a kind of curve that moves from the upper left to the lower right of the canvas propped up by pillows the canvas itself is divided into with a scene taking place in the background so our eye moves down her body and then to the background and those figures in the background on the right really balance the mass of her body on the left without distracting from it because they are in the distance and so it's a really successful composition and like so many other artists later who are going to paint the female nude there is a little bit of playing fast and loose with human anatomy yet her torso is too long the feet are tiny her Finas true her feet are tiny I hadn't noticed that before it's funny that it's not something we noticed immediately what we notice as soon as we look at it is her incredible beauty and sensuality and sexuality and it's only when we start to really look closely and pay attention that we noticed those problems so think about all the artists that are looking back to this painting in this kind of painting I'm thinking about corbeil we've already mentioned MANET and that's right so many people who are his reinventing what Titian did and Tish and himself is looking back at a painting by Giorgione and so this emergence of the female nude as a genre really begins in the Renaissance you [Music]