Sleeping Venus

None of the paintings of the Italian Renaissance had as many repetitions and variations as Giorgione's Sleeping Venus. Not to mention the artist's contemporaries, she struck the imagination of Durer and Cranach the Elder. Poussin and Velazquez, Rembrandt and Rubens, Ingres and Delacroix, Manet and Gauguin.
By the beginning of the 16th century, the image of Venus was not yet common in Italian art. Despite its secular nature, the art of that time still retained the remnants of naive piety, and the image of a naked female body was very rare.
A completely different idea of female beauty - the flesh of the flesh of a beautiful reality and at the same time sublime and chaste - is revealed in the painting by Giorgione.

Giorgione's Sleeping Venus is perhaps the first Renaissance painting in which nudity is its main theme. Venus sleeps, not knowing her nakedness, just as Adam and Eve did not know about her before the Fall, and therefore nakedness is so beautiful and sinless that the viewer looks at her only as an object of worship.

The image of this beautiful woman-goddess is devoid of a touch of eroticism, even in the slightest degree. On the contrary, few of the artists of the Renaissance (and of subsequent centuries) managed to create a more sublime and chaste image.

Everything in her is harmony, everything is wonderful,
All above the world and passions,
She rests bashfully
In its solemn beauty.
(A.S. Pushkin)