Schlafende Venus

Around 1510 Giorgione laid out this sleeping goddess, a nude stretched full length across the canvas, eyes closed, her body following the same soft curve as the hills behind her. It was a new idea. Before this, painters did not give a whole picture over to a woman simply asleep and at ease in a landscape, and the pose would echo through art for centuries after. Giorgione did not live to finish it. He died in a Venetian outbreak of plague in 1510, only about thirty years old, and the younger Titian is generally thought to have completed the landscape and sky. How much of the figure is whose hand is still argued over by scholars, some now giving even the sleeping Venus largely to Titian. The curtained bed she once lay against was painted out long ago, so today she sleeps in the open air.