Venere allo specchio

Titian painted this around 1555, and he liked it enough to keep it. It stayed in his house in Venice until he died in 1576, and his workshop turned out something like 30 variations on the design over the years, which tells you how much demand there was for it. X-rays have found a secret underneath: Titian built this Venus straight over an abandoned double portrait of a man and a woman, reusing the canvas. She sits half-draped in red and fur while two small cupids hold up a mirror for her. The picture's later history is stranger still. In 1931 Stalin's government sold it abroad, and it ended up with the American banker Andrew Mellon, who gave it to the new National Gallery in Washington.