Renaissance painting is stretched between two poles. The Florentine and Roman school leans on *disegno* — drawing, design, precise contour; form is built first by line, colour filled in afterward. Venice chose *colorito*: form is built directly from patches of colour and transitions of light and shade; the contour often dissolves into air. Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) was the greatest master of this second path.

Painted in 1538 for the Duke of Urbino, this work takes its measure from Giorgione's reclining Venus; but Titian moves the figure from a distant countryside into the interior of a Venetian palace. In the background maids draw clothes from a chest; a myrtle plant sits on the windowsill and a dog sleeps — a scene where marriage, fidelity, and sensuality intertwine. Yet the true subject of the painting is not the narrative but the flesh: Titian builds the warmth of skin not with one firm colour but with thin, semi-transparent layers laid over one another (glazes); light seems to spread from within the body.

His contemporary, the artist-biographer Vasari, wrote that in old age Titian "worked with his fingers as much as his brush," that up close the marks were chaos and at a distance a living whole. This is a method that confesses painting to be a tangible surface — a herald of what Manet and the Impressionists would discover three centuries later.

The Venus of Urbino became the standard for every reclining nude that followed; in 1863 Manet built Olympia directly upon this composition, turning each of its elements into the present. And Titian's colour is the source of a whole lineage running from Rubens to Velázquez and on to modern painting. The work hangs today in the Uffizi in Florence.