“Why does sexual obsession so suit the medium of painting?”

This intriguing question was posed by John Berger, art critic and host of the BBC series Ways of Seeing, originally broadcast in 1972. On this landmark television show, which shaped cultural studies for decades, Berger singled out Titian as someone who intuitively understood that paint hues based on the natural pigmentation of human beings trigger our biological reflexes and our sexual imagination.

The woman in Titian’s Venus with a Mirror oozes with desirability. It’s not the nudity, it’s the paint. Color can be very sensual.

Titian’s Venus is looking over her shoulder, acknowledging her reflection in the mirror by placing her left hand on the center of her chest. Does she feel attractive? How important is feeling attractive to female sexual desire?

Two putti attend to her because she is the mythological goddess of love and beauty. One winged child holds up a mirror, while the other stretches to crown her with a wreath of myrtle — a reminder that Paris, the prince of Troy, crowned Venus with myrtle when he declared she was the most beautiful goddess of all.

To create Venus’s pose, Titian added the impression of movement to an ancient Greek statue he long admired. But his Venus isn’t cold, like marble. The artist put so much red pigment in his flesh tones, we can sense the blood flowing through her veins.

He liked to say a good artist needs only three paint colors: black, white, and red. He was exaggerating, but not by much. His magnificent portraits of Cardinal Pietro Bembo and eleven-year-old Ranuccio Farnese prove his point.

Titian painted more than fifteen portraits of Venus with a mirror, but only one was completed entirely by his own hand, without the aid of studio assistants. Today it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

A tour de force of brushwork

At the National Gallery, X-ray analysis revealed that Titian rotated and reused this canvas. He painted Venus directly over an older composition of a man and a woman standing side by side. The man, shown nearly in profile, is looking at a woman intently. She appears lost in thought.

Titian rotated the original canvas clockwise 90 degrees, left the fur coat of the male figure exposed, and reconfigured the garment into the plush robe that now hugs Venus’s hips.

In Titian’s day, this particular portrait was one of a marching band of portraits lined up in his business-like workshop. Each one featured a popular historical or religious figure like The Penitent Magdalene — a young woman fasting in the desert wearing nothing but her long, voluptuously disheveled hair.

When asked how a starving woman could be in such robust health, the artist replied with a twinkle that perhaps this was the first day of her fast.

A few good mentors

Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) was born in a small mountain town in the Italian Dolomites. As a young boy, it’s rumored he made colors from berry juice and flowers to paint a large portrait on the side of a house. No word on how his parents reacted to this escapade, but when Titian was ten years old he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Venice.

He must have been a prodigious talent because a few years later he entered the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, the most prominent painter in Venice.

Bellini’s circle included Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco (Giorgione), a gifted former student ten years older than Titian. Giorgione encouraged the younger artist’s predilection for sensuous pigments and the illusion of movement.

A powerful influence on Titian, Giorgione was also a cult figure among the young noblemen who considered themselves the intellectual vanguard of Venice. Giorgione was the first local painter to be admired because his paintings looked unlike the work of other artists.

A fundamental painting in his catalogue is The Old Woman, a portrait that is one of the most startling and engaging images of the Italian Renaissance.

The woman — who may or may not be Giorgione’s mother — has thinning gray hair and weathered skin. She wears a pretty shawl that covers part of her blouse. Age makes her gentle expression hard to read. Is she tired? Sad? Trying to smile?

Like Venus, she places her hand on the center of her chest, but now the gesture registers differently. Giorgione tucked a note in her sleeve for all of us to read: Col Tempo (With Time). Tell me about it.