裸婦

This battered figure is almost all that survives of something once enormous. In 1508 the German merchants' warehouse in Venice, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, had just been rebuilt after a fire, and its outer walls facing the Grand Canal were covered in frescoes by Giorgione, with the young Titian working on another side of the building. Weather and salt air ate the paintings away over the centuries, and this nude woman in her niche is one of the few pieces rescued, peeled off the wall in 1937. We know Giorgione did the main facade because he sued over his fee, and the record of that dispute survives. What the figure was meant to mean, standing above a busy trading house, nobody now can say.