Date of Award

4-15-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Art

First Advisor

Floyd Martin

Abstract

There have been numerous scholarly interpretations of Titian’s Venus of Urbino since Giorgio Vasari first named the work upon seeing it in 1548. Even so, problems remain in Titian’s hermeneutics and semiology relevant to the artist’s personal circumstances that places the Venus of Urbino in a unique genre. Biographers and art historians since the 16th century have written about and admired this work. Additionally, scholars of the 20th century have painstakingly sought to understand the work’s layers of meaning, but still the Venus of Urbino remains an interpretive mystery. Firstly, my thesis will examine the timeline of references to Titian’s Venus of Urbino in the 16th century to better understand the context in which it was made. Secondly, I will carefully examine related 20th century scholarship focusing on iconography that seeks to explain the meaning of the work more deeply in order to redefine the painting as something intimately personal to the artist. To conclude, I will propose a new view about the Venus of Urbino being an idealization of the past in the immortalization of a young, beautiful, woman in an early example of a memento mori and an allegory of lost love.

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