Flora

Titian painted Flora in Venice around 1517, when he was still a young man taking over the city's art after Giorgione's early death. A woman turns half out of the dark, one hand gathering her white shift, the other holding a loose spray of spring flowers, roses, violets and jasmine. For centuries people argued about who she was. Some called her a courtesan, reading the loosened dress and the bare shoulder as an invitation. More recent study leans the other way, toward a bride, the flowers offered as a promise of a coming marriage rather than a price. The name Flora, the nymph of spring from Ovid, was attached later, by a collector who saw the painting in Amsterdam in the 1630s.