Venetian painter Giorgio da Castelfranco is otherwise known as Giorgio Barbarelli, Zorzo, or, most commonly, Giorgione. He was born in Castelfranco, Italy in 1447 and according to Vasari he trained with Giovanni Bellini. Vasari dubbed Giorgione the nickname, which means Big George, because of his physical appearance and his moral and intellectual characteristics. Not a lot is known about his life and only a few of his works can be accredited to him. He also became momentous because in subsequent centuries he has continued to stimulate creativity in a way that few other painters can match. He initiated a new conception of painting and was one of the earliest artists to specialize in cabinet pictures for private collectors rather than works for public patrons. Nevertheless, he achieved legendary status soon after his early death, which was most likely from the plague.

Giorgione’s painting “Sleeping Venus” was painted in 1510 with oil on canvas and is 42 ¾ x 69”. This was one of his last paintings, or so we are led to believe because Titian finished it.

Tiziano Vecellio, also known as Titian, was born in Cadore and lived until 1576. The misconception that he lived to the age of 99 is no longer accepted. When Vasari visited Titian 1566, he documented Titian’s age as 76, which would make him be born in 1489 or 1490. He assisted Giorgione in painting frescos on the exterior of the German commercial headquarters in Venice.

Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” was painted in 1538 for Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Camerino (and later Duke of Urbino) . It is 47 x 65” and was painted with oil on canvas.

When he was eight, Titian arrived in Venice with his older brother and worked with Zuccato, a mosaicist. Even in this authoritative shop he did not stay long, but moved on to study with Giorgione. Bellini and Giorgione trained him and he learned so well from them that it is uncertain the degree of his participation on their later works. By 1510 he seems to have become independent. After Giovanni’s death in 1516, the republic of Venice appointed Titian as its official painter. In 1545 and 1546 he was awarded Roman citizenship on the Capitoline Hill and twice the emperor called him to Augsburg as court painter.

The manner in which the figure overshadows the landscape and depicting multifaceted works of art are typical of Giorgione’s style and “The Sleeping Venus” is no exception. He used poetic mood evoked by the subject. According to Art in Renaissance Italy, Giorgione was the first to discard detail and substitute breadth and boldness in the treatment of nature and architecture; and he was the first to recognize that the painter's chief aim is decorative effect.

Stanley Freedberg in his book, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, said Giorgione moves away from his standard analytical style to depict this Venus in a dizzying poetic abstraction:

The shape of being is the visual demonstration of a state of being in which idealized existence is suspended in immutable slow-breathing harmony. All the sensuality has been distilled off this sensuous presence, and all incitement; Venus denotes not the act of love but the recollection. The perfect embodiment of Giorgione's dream, she dreams his dream herself.

Mythology and sensuality were common themes for court sophisticates and people of the renaissance. Poesa painting meant to operate in an indirect manner of poetry and one of the foremost painters of that style was Giorgione. The reclining figure was originally accompanied a small figure of cupid holding a bird at the right side of the painting, but this figure was painted over in 1843, most likely to focus attention solely on the female nude.

According to Gardner’s Art through the Ages he was the first to paint landscapes with figures and the first to paint genre works which are movable pictures in their own frames with no devotional, allegorical, or historical purpose. In fact, her body echoes the curves of the earth. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to her conscious expression.

Giorgione placed Venus across the whole width of the painting. Venus’s sensuality is heightened by her red lips and by the red velvet and white satin drapery upon which her creamy body lies. Significantly, she is asleep, so the issue of etiquette is not a concern here, and she becomes an object of voyeuristic gaze from the viewer. But her sleep also implies dreaming and transport of the figure to another world.

Nothing can override the sensuality of the image. The pose and former cupid are the only things connecting her to the classical conception. Her left hand seems not to be modestly hiding her genitals but apparently pleasuring them, which are also at the exact vertical center of the painting. Art in Renaissance Italy said, “According to gynecological treatise of the time, female masturbation made a woman more fertile.” The drapery also has fertility implication. According to Art in Renaissance Italy, “Reclining nude men or women appeared regularly on the inside of covers and dowry chests.”

In Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”, according to Gardener, there is no evidence suggesting the Duke proposed to commission anything more than a female nude for his private enjoyment even thought the title of the works suggests it is the mythological god. It is not everyday you see a nude god laying in bed of the house as you, but he two ladies in the background do not act as if something out of the ordinary has happened. Either Titian tried to humanize this god in order to not elevate a pagan god to the status of a Christian god, this is not Venus at all, or maybe Venus has been here many times before.

If this is indeed Venus, then Titian has gone out of his way to demythologize her. He painted her as a lover who relaxes in the glow of her own warm toned flesh instead of painting her a deity. Gardener also added Titian based his version on an earlier and pioneering painting of Venus by Giorgione, a painting that Titian is attributed to have finished.

Titian established the standard for reclining female nude paintings in his “Venus of Urbino.” According to Art in Renaissance Italy Titian found a ready market for sensuous, aesthetic mythical subject matter. “Especially popular were paintings of reclining women, dubbed Venus by later generations, but which sixteenth century documents unabashedly called nude women,” wrote Art in Renaissance Italy. Titian made their erotic intent unmistakable in this painting that he produced for Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere of Urbino around 1538. Instead of placing her in a poetic landscape, he presents his object of desire inside a handsome palace, displaying herself on a luxurious red couch. Her golden tresses cascade alluringly over her shoulder to her bracelet right arm and hand, which toys with a small bouquet of flowers.

Instead of a sleeping Venus, Titian paints one who is awake and looks at us with a calculating stare. She lays upon a couch with her golden brown hair that flooded over her shoulder. He divided his background between the cubicle in which the nude reclines and an adjoining chamber, paved with marble, hung with brocades, and lit by an opening onto treetops. In this palatial environment, a splendidly dressed woman looks on while a girl in white searched for something in one of a paint of carved and gilded, the chests in which clothes were kept in tradition with the Renaissance.

At her feet is a pendant which is a balancing figure in art. In this work it is a slumbering lap dog. Behind her a simple drape both places her figure emphatically in the foreground and indicates a vista into the background at the right half of the picture. Two servants bend over a chest, apparently searching for garments (Renaissance households stored clothing in carved wooden chests) to clothe Venus. Beyond them, a smaller vista opens into a landscape. Titian masterfully constructed the view background into space and the division of the space into progressively smaller units.

Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus” initiated a type of dreamy romantic art that became immensely popular in Venice. He used sfumato or chiaroscuro, which are the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective. His colors possess ardent, glowing, and melting intensity. He never subordinated line and colour to architecture, nor an artistic effect to a sentimental presentation.

He was ground breaking in tonal painting by creating images through color without the linear structure. Through the modulation of light in tonal gradation as a means of placing the human figure in the landscape, Giorgione successfully understood an entirely new vision, a more intimate link between man and nature

As in other Venetian paintings, color plays an important role in Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”. “He was the most extraordinary and prolific of the great Venation painter, a supreme colorist who cultivated numerous patrons,” according to Gardener. The matron’s neutral white sleeves and the girl’s dress against the matron’s red skirt and the muted red draperies recall the Venetian color palette.

The subtlety of color arrangement is impeccable; he used color to organize where he placed his figures, and not to tint them. For example, two deep reds cushions in the foreground and the skirt in the background function as a gauge of distance and an indication of an implied diagonal which emphasizes the explicate diagonal of the reclining figure.

Titian’s work established oil color on canvas as a typical medium of pictorial tradition. According to a contemporary of Titian, Palma Giovane:

Titian [employed] a great mass of colors, which served … as a base for the compositions…I too have seen some of these, formed with bold strokes made with brushes laden with colors, sometimes of a pure red earth, which he used, so to speak, for middle tone, and at other times of white lead; and with the same brush tinted with red, black, and yellow he formed a highlight; and observing these principles he made the promise of an exceptional figure in four brushstrokes…

Having constructed these precious foundations he used to turn his pictures to the wall and leave them there without looking at them, sometimes for several months. When he wanted to apply his brush again he would examine with the utmost rigor…to see if he could find any faults…In this way, working on the figure and revising them, he brought them to the most perfect symmetry that the beauty of art and nature can reveal…[T]hus he gradually covered the quintessential forms with living flesh, bringing them by many stages to a state in which they lacked only the breath of life. He never painted a figure all at once and … in the last stages he pained more with his figures than his brushes.

He built up his picture in oil over a reddish ground to establish a warm base for all colors

Giorgione was trained in manuscript illumination and he brought those techniques into his oil painting. These skills gave his works a magical glow of light. Moreover, he moved his brush with great freedom, animating the shadow world with the motion of his hand as well as with the saturation of color.

An important change occurred in Titian’s time was the almost universal adoption of canvas, with its rough textured surface, in place of wood panel paintings. Titian painted in a technique of raised brushstrokes of thick paint called impasto. According to History of Italian Renaissance Art, “Titian was the first painter in his time to free the brush from the task of depicting perfectly surfaces, volumes, and details. He used paint as a vehicle for the perception of light through color and the expressing emotion.” Also, it was recently discovered that his Venus was damaged when it was adhered to new lining by ironing. Consequently, Titian’s rich, raised impasto brushwork was flattened.

Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus” can be found in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden and Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” can be found in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

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