Sacred and Profane Love: Titian's Mysterious Wedding Painting

A Young Painter in Venice

Around 1514, a Venetian painter in his mid-twenties produced one of the most beautiful and most debated pictures of the Italian Renaissance. The painter was Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), born in the mountain town of Pieve di Cadore; his exact birth year is unknown, and scholars usually place it somewhere around 1488–1490. As a boy he was sent to Venice, where he trained in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, the leading painter of the city, and then worked closely with the younger and highly original Giorgione. In 1508 the two artists painted frescoes on the outside of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the warehouse of the German merchants by the Rialto bridge.

Giorgione died of the plague in 1510, still a young man. In the following years Titian took over his poetic, dreamy style, with its soft light, glowing colour and figures resting in open landscapes, and began to turn it into something of his own: stronger, warmer and more monumental. Sacred and Profane Love is the finest example of this moment in his career. It was painted only shortly before he started his first great public commission, the huge altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin for the Frari church in Venice (unveiled in 1518), and the two works together show how quickly the young artist was becoming the first painter of Venice.

A Wedding Commission

The painting has no signature, no date and no surviving contract. The key to its origin is a small detail: a coat of arms carved on the front of the marble basin in the middle of the picture. It belongs to Niccolò Aurelio, a powerful Venetian official who served as secretary to the Council of Ten, the body responsible for the security of the Venetian state. In 1514 Aurelio married Laura Bagarotto, a young widow from Padua. Most scholars therefore believe that he ordered the painting to celebrate this marriage, and the year 1514 is usually given as its date, although the Galleria Borghese's own catalogue prefers about 1515–1516.

The marriage had a dramatic background. During the War of the League of Cambrai, when Venice fought a coalition of European powers, Padua was briefly lost to the enemy. In 1509 Laura's father, the Paduan lawyer Bertuccio Bagarotto, was accused of treason and executed by the Venetian authorities. For Laura to marry one of the most important officials of the same Venetian state was remarkable, and it may explain why the couple wanted a painting full of themes of love, harmony and new beginnings. Some historians have suggested that the picture also carried a message of reconciliation, though this remains a theory.

What the Painting Shows

The canvas is unusually wide: about 118 centimetres high and 279 centimetres long. This long, horizontal format suggests that it was meant to hang in a particular place in a home, perhaps above a piece of furniture such as a wedding chest or a bed.

At the centre stands a carved marble basin that looks like an ancient Roman sarcophagus, a stone coffin, here turned into a fountain. Water flows from a small spout at its front into the grass, and a little winged Cupid leans over the edge and stirs the water with his hand. On either side sits a young woman, and the two look so alike that they may have been painted from the same model:

• On the left, a woman in a magnificent white satin dress with red sleeves sits leaning against the basin. She wears gloves and a belt with a buckle, and a wreath of myrtle leaves crowns her hair. In her lap she holds roses, and beside her stands a closed vessel. She looks out of the picture, calm and serious.
• On the right, a second woman sits on the edge of the fountain, nude except for a white cloth around her hips and a large red cloak that billows over her arm. She raises a small lamp or vessel with a flame, holding it up towards the sky, and turns to look at her companion.

Behind them a broad landscape opens up. On the left, a road climbs to a fortified castle on a hill under a darkening sky, and two rabbits sit in the grass. On the right, the land is brighter and gentler: a village with a church tower stands by a lake, a shepherd watches his flock, and hunters with dogs chase a hare. The relief carved on the basin shows figures in ancient style. In one well-known reading, by the art historian Edgar Wind, they include a man being whipped, a woman pulled by her hair and a horse without a bridle led by its mane; scholars interpret these scenes in different ways, often as images of passions being tamed.

A Title Added Later

The title Sacred and Profane Love was not given by Titian. A title is first recorded in an inventory of the Borghese collection from 1693, almost two centuries after the picture was painted, in the form Amor divino e Amor profano ("Divine love and profane love"); today the painting is known in Italian as Amor sacro e Amor profano. The title reflects the way later viewers understood the two women: one as heavenly love, the other as earthly love.

The word "profane" here does not mean rude or offensive. It comes from Latin and simply means "outside the temple", that is, worldly rather than religious. Interestingly, when the title was invented, many viewers probably saw the nude woman as the "profane" figure. Modern historians usually reverse this: in Renaissance thought, as we will see, nudity could stand for purity and truth.

Two Venuses: How Scholars Read the Picture

There is no single accepted explanation of the painting, and the debate has gone on for more than a century. Several main lines of interpretation have been proposed.

The Neoplatonic reading

The most famous interpretation was developed in the 20th century by the art historian Erwin Panofsky and others. It draws on the ideas of the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who, following Plato, described two kinds of Venus, the goddess of love. The heavenly Venus represents love of eternal, divine beauty; the earthly Venus represents the love that creates life in the natural world. Both are good and noble, but at different levels. In this reading the nude woman with the flame is the heavenly Venus: she has nothing to hide, and her lamp burns with the love of God. The richly dressed woman is the earthly Venus, adorned with the beautiful things of this world. Cupid, mixing the water between them, links the two kinds of love.

The bride and Venus

Many scholars now favour a reading closer to the occasion of the wedding. In this view, the woman in white is the bride herself, Laura Bagarotto or an ideal image of her, and the nude woman is the goddess Venus, who encourages her towards married love. The bride's clothes are full of wedding symbols: white was a colour of purity, myrtle was the plant of Venus and of marriage, and gloves and belts were traditional wedding gifts and signs of fidelity. The roses refer to love, and the rabbits in the landscape were a familiar symbol of fertility, a wish for children.

A scene from a romance

Another suggestion links the painting with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a strange and richly illustrated love story printed in Venice in 1499, which was very popular among educated Venetians. In it, the hero Poliphilo and his beloved Polia meet the goddess Venus at a fountain that is also a tomb. The art historian Walter Friedlaender proposed that Titian took his scene from this book. Whatever the exact source, the mixture of ancient forms, symbols and love poetry fits the learned taste of Titian's patrons.

These readings do not always contradict each other. A Venetian viewer in 1514 might well have seen the picture as a wedding image and as a meditation on the two sides of love at the same time.

Light, Colour and Technique

Whatever its meaning, the painting is above all a triumph of colour. Titian painted in oil on canvas, a support that Venetian artists were among the first in Italy to prefer to wooden panels. He built up the picture in layers, giving the skin of the nude a warm, living glow and setting it against the cool shimmer of the white satin. The strong red of the cloak on the right and of the sleeves on the left ties the two halves of the composition together, and the dark green trees behind the figures make the colours glow even more.

The landscape owes much to Giorgione and to Bellini, but the figures are fuller and more solid than Giorgione's, and their poses are clearly planned. The composition is balanced like a pair of scales: two women, two landscapes, two moods, with Cupid and the fountain at the centre. Scientific analysis of the paint in 2000 identified the pigments he used, among them lead white, blue azurite, lead-tin yellow, red vermilion and yellow ochre: a limited range from which he drew remarkably rich effects. The evening light, falling from the left, softens every edge and gives the whole scene a quiet, timeless mood that Venetian painting would make famous.

From Venice to the Galleria Borghese

The painting probably stayed in Venice for most of the 16th century, but its exact history in those years is not known. In 1608 it was bought in Rome by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V and one of the most passionate art collectors of his time, as part of a group of paintings from the collection of another cardinal, Paolo Emilio Sfondrato. Scipione Borghese also supported the young sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini and collected works by Caravaggio and Raphael. Since then, Sacred and Profane Love has remained in the Borghese collection, now the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

The painting has a famous place in the history of art prices. In 1899 a member of the Rothschild banking family offered to buy it for 4 million lire. This sum was said to be more than the estimated value of the whole Villa Borghese, including its park and all its other works of art. The offer was refused. A few years later, in 1902, the Italian state acquired the Borghese collection and the villa, and the painting became public property. It is now one of the best-known works in the museum.

Influence and Lasting Fascination

Sacred and Profane Love marks the moment when Titian moved beyond his teachers. In it he showed that a painting could be a kind of visual poem, full of meaning but also simply beautiful to look at, an idea that guided his later mythological works. Within a few years he would paint lively scenes from ancient myth for the Duke of Ferrara, such as Bacchus and Ariadne, and his calm, idealised nude on the right of this picture points ahead to his reclining goddesses, above all the Venus of Urbino of 1538.

For later artists the painting became a model of Venetian colour and harmony. Peter Paul Rubens and many others studied Titian's handling of skin and fabric, and painters from the 17th century onwards copied and adapted his compositions. For writers and historians, meanwhile, the picture has become one of the great puzzles of Renaissance art. It shows how a single image could combine a wedding celebration, philosophy, ancient myth and the hopes of a real couple living through a difficult time.

A few smaller details are worth looking for on a visit: the tiny figures in the landscape, the rabbits in the grass, the coat of arms of Niccolò Aurelio on the fountain, and the way Cupid's arm disappears into the water. Each one invites viewers to slow down and look again, which is perhaps what Titian intended all along.