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Titian painted this in 1538 for Guidobaldo della Rovere, the young Duke of Urbino, who in his letters simply called it the naked woman. It was never meant to hang in a public gallery. It was a private picture for a duke's chamber, and it borrows the pose of an older sleeping Venus by Giorgione, then wakes her up. This Venus is awake, at home, and looking straight at you. In the background two servants bend over a chest of the kind a Venetian bride kept her linens in, and a little dog sleeps curled at her feet, an old sign of fidelity. Many scholars now read the whole thing as a marriage picture, a reminder to a new wife of love and faithfulness in the bedroom. Its afterlife was less demure. When the American writer Mark Twain saw it in Florence in the 1870s he called it the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses, which tells you more about the 19th century than about Titian. It hangs today in the Uffizi, a few rooms from Botticelli's Venus rising from the sea.