田园合奏

This picture has spent 500 years causing arguments about who painted it. Made around 1509 in Venice, it was long given to Giorgione, and for centuries people saw it as his. Now most scholars read the sturdy, confident figures as the work of the young Titian, at the very start of his career, and some think he finished something Giorgione had begun before dying in 1511. The scene itself withholds as much as it shows. Two young men make music in a landscape while two nude women stand close by, one pouring water, and the men act as if they cannot see them, which has led to the reading that the women are not really present at all but figures of poetry and music. Later it caught the eye of Manet, who borrowed its clothed-men-and-nude-woman idea for his own scandalous picnic.