L'Amour sacré et l'Amour profane

The grand title came late. Titian painted this around 1514 as a wedding picture, for the marriage of a Venetian official named Niccolò Aurelio to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto, and the couple's coats of arms sit on the stone basin between the two women. For a long time nobody called it Sacred and Profane Love. The earliest description, from 1613, simply named it Beauty adorned and Beauty unadorned, and the familiar title only appears in a Borghese inventory in 1693. The clothed woman carries the signs a Venetian bride would: gloves, roses, a little crown of myrtle, a silversmith's box of the kind a best man gave. What the two figures actually mean has been argued over for centuries, and the picture still hangs in the Borghese collection in Rome where those inventories were written.