The Venus of Urbino (also known as Reclining Venus) is an oil painting by Italian painter Titian, depicting a nude young woman, traditionally identified with the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance palace. Work on the painting seems to have begun anywhere from 1532 or 1534, and was perhaps completed in 1534, but not sold until 1538. It is currently held in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The figure’s pose derives from the Dresden Venus made around 1510–11, traditionally attributed to Giorgione but with the landscape completed by Titian. In this painting, Titian places Venus indoors, meets the viewer’s gaze, and makes her sensuality explicit. Iconographic interpretations of the painting among art historians fall into two groups; both agree that the painting has a powerful erotic charge, but beyond that, it is seen either as a portrait of a courtesan, perhaps Zaffetta, or as a painting celebrating the marriage of its first owner (who according to some may not have commissioned it). This disagreement forms part of a wider debate on the meaning of the mainly Venetian tradition of the reclining female nude, which Titian had created, or helped to create. The woman's intimate gesture has been interpreted by some scholars to represent masturbation, an act linked to Renaissance marriage customs, where female arousal—including self-stimulation—was believed to aid conception and ensure successful consummation. For Charles Hope, "It has yet to be shown that the most famous example of this genre, Titian's Venus of Urbino, is anything other than a representation of a beautiful nude woman on a bed, devoid of classical or even allegorical content". Even the indefatigable finder of allegories drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Edgar Wind, had to admit that in this case "an undisguised hedonism had at last dispelled the Platonic metaphors".

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