Venus with Cupid

Around 1550, Venice had a booming private market for paintings like this one, reclining Venus figures made for the bedrooms and studies of wealthy collectors rather than for churches or public halls. Titian and his workshop turned out several close variations, and this is one of them. The meaning sits in the small things. A black-and-white dog is curled at the foot of the couch, its eyes fixed on a partridge perched on the ledge behind it. The partridge was an old emblem of desire and fertility, the kind of quiet cue a 16th-century viewer would read at once. The composition fed directly into Titian's better-known Venus and a Musician pictures, where an organist or lute player takes the place of the standing Cupid. How much of the brushwork here is Titian's own hand and how much his assistants' is still debated. The painting entered the Medici collections and hangs today in the Uffizi.