Sleeping Venus (Giorgione)

The Sleeping Venus, also known as the Dresden Venus, is a painting traditionally attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, held in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. It has long been widely thought that Titian completed the work after Giorgione's death in 1510, with the landscape and sky generally accepted as mainly Titian's, and twenty-first century scholarship increasingly attributing even the nude figure of Venus to Titian, leaving Giorgione's own contribution uncertain. The painting shows a nude woman reclining with her profile echoing the rolling hills behind her, and is considered the first known reclining nude in Western painting, helping establish an erotic mythological pastoral tradition of female nudes in a landscape that became a distinctive feature of Venetian painting for centuries afterward. X-ray analysis in the twentieth century confirmed that the composition was altered during painting, including the removal of a seated Cupid once shown beside Venus's feet, though the reasons for the changes remain unknown.