Girl in a Fur

The same young woman turns up in several of Titian's paintings of the 1530s, as the richly dressed La Bella and, reclining and nude, as the Venus of Urbino. Nobody knows who she was. The pictures were made for the court of Urbino, for Francesco Maria della Rovere and his son, and she seems to have been less a real sitter than Titian's idea of ideal beauty, the kind praised in the Petrarch-flavoured love poetry then in fashion. Here she holds a dark fur against her half-bare body, wearing pearls, teardrop earrings and gold rings. The way she draws the fur across herself with one hand follows a classical statue type of Venus covering her nakedness, which Titian would have known from Roman sculpture.