Bathing Nymphs

In the autumn of 1524 the painter Giulio Romano, Raphael's chief assistant, left Rome for Mantua, and the Gonzaga court there was soon filling with his muscular, twisting figures. Palma Vecchio, working in Venice in the last years of his life, knew that kind of design, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum sees it in this late canvas. The nymphs bend, sit and turn against one another like a group worked out in stone. Some of their poses are borrowed from ancient sculpture, and every outline is drawn with a firmness that was unusual in Venice.

Naked women in a landscape had been a Venetian subject for some 20 years. What changes here is the skin. Instead of the warm, soft surface Venetian painters were known for, the figures have a cool finish that the museum compares to porcelain. The picture is dated to about 1525 to 1528. At some point it was cut down along the top edge, and the canvas is now mounted on wood. In 1781 it was recorded in Pressburg, today's Bratislava, and it only joined the picture gallery in 1930, when it was brought over from the Hofburg.