ABSTRACT
The erotic appeal of Titian's women is undeniable, and the sensual enjoyment of his nudes and poesie by his patrons and admirers evidently had much to do with their success. New archival evidence shows how the Sacred and Profane Love reflects the particular social and psychological concerns of the actual husband and wife who commissioned it. Titian's two protagonists in the Sacred and Profane Love are female represents in itself another remarkable departure from tradition: wedding pictures characteristically and appropriately represent couples, not women alone. Titian's painting is also more disguised in its eroticism, if no less potent than Lotto's. Titian's image of bridal consent is very different from the traditional Renaissance man's picture of marriage as a property exchange negotiated by men and sealed by rape, to which the Sabine woman eventually accedes—she being the prototypical bride according to humanist sociology.
