Vénus et Cupidon

Around 1510 the young Titian was working in Venice in the shadow of Giorgione, whose soft, dreamlike manner had set the local fashion. That year Giorgione died in an outbreak of plague, still only in his early thirties, and Titian took over both his unfinished pictures and much of his style. This small Venus and Cupid comes from those first years, so close to the older man's work that it once hung in a French royal collection under Giorgione's name. The panel is rubbed and hard to read today, part of why its authorship was long argued over. The warm light on the goddess's skin, though, is the lesson Titian carried straight out of Giorgione's studio.