The painting is presumed to have been commissioned by Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten, whose coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus or fountain, to celebrate his marriage to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto.

The woman on the left is fully and richly dressed; her clothes are now usually recognized as those of a bride,[11][12] though in the past they have been said to be typical of courtesan wear.

[14] The nude figure sits comfortably on the ledge of the trough, with one hand resting on it and the other held high, holding a vessel with smoke coming out of it, probably an incense-burner.

[18][19] They were described by Edgar Wind as "A man is being scourged, a woman dragged by the hair, and an unbridled horse is led away by the mane", all perhaps images of the taming of the passions.

[20] Alternatively they have been seen as (reading right to left): Adam and Eve standing beside the Tree of Knowledge, Cain killing Abel, and the Conversion of Saint Paul, shown falling off his horse.

Two men on horses are hunting a hare or outsized rabbit with fast lurcher-type dogs, and a flock of sheep are apparently tended by a shepherd, with a pair of lovers sitting nearby.

Although the first record of a version of what is now the usual title is only in an inventory of 1693,[27] it remains possible that the two female figures are indeed intended to be personifications of the Neoplatonic concepts of sacred and profane love.

The art historian Walter Friedländer outlined similarities between the painting and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and proposed that the two figures represented Polia and Venere, the two female characters in the 1499 romance.

After a decade of search in multiple and sometimes contradictory directions, Titian has settled for the basic proposition of classical style that had been expounded by Giorgione, but with precise self-knowledge of the differences of personality and vision — and, not least, of hand — with which could interpret it.

"[28] A religious painting of the same period, that has many similarities in style is the Noli me tangere, probably also of 1514 (National Gallery), in which Titian uses much the same group of buildings as at the left here, but reversed and without the tower.