Venus of Urbino

Titian painted Venus of Urbino in 1534 for Guidobaldo II della Rovere, who was then only 17. Its subject — a nude woman reclining in a domestic interior — was innovative: where earlier reclining nudes (like Giorgione's Sleeping Venus) were placed in pastoral landscapes, Titian placed his Venus in a contemporary domestic bedroom, making the connection between the divine and the everyday explicit.

Mark Twain, visiting the Uffizi in 1880, described it as 'the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses' — an indication of how provocative its direct gaze continued to be to Victorian sensibilities. When Manet painted Olympia in 1863, he used Titian's composition as the explicit model, substituting a contemporary Parisian woman for the goddess — and the Paris Salon erupted in scandal.