Vénus au repos

A few rooms away in the same Dresden gallery hangs the picture that began all of this, Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, painted around 1510. Giorgione had done something new there, laying a nude goddess out asleep in the open countryside, at ease in a Venetian landscape. He died young in a plague, and other Venetian painters took up the idea. Palma Vecchio was one of them. His Venus reclines in the same unhurried way against a wide, gentle landscape, though she is awake now and turns her gaze outward. Palma ran a busy Venice workshop and painted many of these full, golden-haired Venetian beauties. The soft distances behind her, hills fading into a warm haze, are the countryside of the Veneto he knew.