Venus and the Lute Player

Titian painted this Venus and the Lute Player in the last years of his life, around 1565 to 1570. He was in his late seventies, working in Venice, and he had been painting reclining nudes for decades. This is one of several versions of the composition that he and his workshop produced, all based on the same arrangement: Venus lying nude on a bed, a musician seated at her feet playing an instrument. Venus lies on white sheets across the lower half of the canvas, her body turned toward the viewer, her left arm resting on a pillow. A dog sleeps at her feet, a symbol of fidelity. A lute player sits at the lower right, looking up at her face while he plays. Behind them, a servant rummages in a chest. Through the window at the upper left, a landscape with trees and a distant mountain. The colors are warm: deep red curtains, golden flesh, white linen, a green sky. Titian painted the first version of this composition, now at the Prado, around 1550. In that version the musician plays an organ. In the Met version, painted 15 years later, he plays a lute. The change matters: the lute was associated with love poetry and courtship in Renaissance culture, and the painting becomes a scene of musical seduction. Venus looks past the musician, her expression ambiguous, neither encouraging nor rejecting him. The painting is large, 65 by 82 inches, and it was made for a private collector, probably for a bedroom or a private gallery. Reclining nudes were a specialty of Titian's workshop, produced for patrons who wanted mythological scenes with erotic content dressed up in classical language. The Venus of Urbino, painted for the Duke of Urbino in 1538 and now at the Uffizi, is the most famous example. The Met version is softer and more painterly than the Urbino Venus, with the loose brushwork and thick impasto of Titian's late style. Oil on canvas, 165 by 210 centimeters. Titian painted with loose, loaded brushwork, building the flesh tones in thick layers of warm color. The surface is rough up close, with visible brush marks and patches of bare canvas. The dog at Venus's feet is barely more than a smear of brown paint. This is the style that later painters called painting alla macchia, painting with patches, and it was enormously influential on later Venetian painters and on Velazquez. The warm palette and reclining figure make this print work well in a bedroom or a living room with warm-toned walls. The horizontal format suits a wide wall space above a sofa or a bed. A dark wood frame picks up the painting's deep reds and browns. The 18x24 size gives the brushwork and the landscape enough room to read. The painting came to the Met as a gift from Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham in 1937. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.