now one of my favorite paintings
Titian
The Lovers
The Queens Gallery, London
1510
This arrangement of figures in art often depicts a courtesan or faithless wife in the arms of her young lover with elderly and rich husband in the background. The woman here does not wear the elaborate clothes or jewellery of a courtesan and there is no sense of treachery in the scene. Though x-rays have shown that in an earlier version of the painting she was more elaborately dressed and the hand on her shoulder was not there. In the nineteenth-century the painting was called ‘a sick Lady, her Husband and a physician’.