Pardo Venus

Analysis of its style and composition shows that Titian modified a Bacchanalian scene he had begun much earlier in his career by completing the landscape background and adding figures.

For Sydney Freedberg it was "probably in substance an invention of the later 1530s, though significantly reworked later; it is full of motifs and ideas that have been recollected from an earlier and more Giorgionesque time, ordered in an obvious and uncomplicated classicizing scheme.

[6] Malcolm Bull observed: "In later inventories the terms "naked woman" and "Venus" are almost interchangeable", and the presence of her son Cupid an uncertain indicator, as he often appears with other people.

In the right foreground we have a scene that would have been familiar to well-educated Renaissance viewers as Jupiter, having taken the form of a satyr, creeping up on the sleeping nymph Antiope, and lifting her drapery to view her naked.

The painting can be compared to his The Bacchanal of the Andrians of 1523-24 (Prado), where an apparently unconscious nude in a version of the Dresden Venus pose shares the picture space with a group of revellers in a mixture of nudity, contemporary and classical dress.

Venus or Antiope sleeps as yet undisturbed, not only by the voyeur, but a hunting scene above her, where hounds have brought down a stag, and immediately left of her, a satyr or faun with the legs of a goat seated on the ground, in conversation with a lady in contemporary dress.

The river has a wide waterfall above the stag, and presumably then flows above the conversing couple before perhaps circling round behind the viewer to create the water behind the Jupiter/satyr, but this is not shown clearly, which is rather typical of Titian.

[10] Harold Wethey was not impressed by the idea that the different elements represented different modes of life: "active" in the hunters, "voluptuous" in Venus/Antiope and Jupiter, and "contemplative" in the couple sitting on the grass.

[19] Despite this prestige, the painting was given to Charles I of England in 1623 when, as Prince of Wales, he made a quixotic, unauthorized and unplanned visit to Madrid to try to acquire a Spanish bride.

After Charles' execution, the valuers assessing his collection in Whitehall Palace found the "great Lardge and famous peece" in the "Second and Middle Privie Lodging Roome", along with the Venus and Musician now in the Prado, and valued them at £500 and £150 respectively.