Episode 204 - Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” (Uffizi Galleries)

Titian was the greatest Venetian painter of his age. His reputation and achievements in 16th-century Europe were rivaled only by Michelangelo. Venetian artists introduced their own particular style and vision into Renaissance art, as seen in the Venus of Urbino. Suddenly, female nudity and eroticism exploded onto the scene in a type of soft-core Renaissance pornography. This episode explores the unusual erotic iconography of the Venus of Urbino, and how it depicts a rather straight-forward visual voyeurism between subject and object.