For Charles Hope, "It has yet to be shown that the most famous example of this genre, Titian's Venus of Urbino, is anything other than a representation of a beautiful nude woman on a bed, devoid of classical or even allegorical content.

"[3] Even the indefatigable finder of allegories drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Edgar Wind, had to admit that in this case "an undisguised hedonism had at last dispelled the Platonic metaphors".

Ippolito died in August 1535, and apparently never saw the painting, which was still in Titian's studio when Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the 24-year-old son of the Duke of Urbino came in January 1538 to sit for a portrait.

As letters from him and his mother show, he was extremely keen to buy it, and did so some months later; he referred to it simply as "the nude woman", and was worried Titian would sell it to someone else.

[10] A recent theory by Józef Grabski suggests that the painting represents an allegory of marital love between the famous Italian poet Vittoria Colonna and her deceased husband, Fernando d'Ávalos.

Grabski supports his theory through analyzing various visual clues and symbols, the most prominent being the classic column in front of the trees in the window in the right half, a small detail on the painting that imitates the Colonna Family coat of arms.

Twain does this to juxtapose the artistic license (for nudity, for example) allowed in painting, as opposed to the restrictions and Victorian morality imposed on literature in the "last eighty or ninety years".

In the same passage, Twain also mocks the fig leaves placed in the 19th century on nude statues in Rome, which had "stood in innocent nakedness for ages."