Where Is Sacred and Profane Love? Museum Location

Q: Which figure is Sacred and which is Profane?

Scholars still debate this question. The nude may be sacred (heavenly truth) or profane (sensuality). The clothed figure may be virtuous (modesty) or worldly (vanity). Titian may have intended the ambiguity.

Q: What is the meaning of Sacred and Profane Love?

The painting likely celebrates marriage and love's symbolic power. It was commissioned for a wedding. The two figures may represent complementary aspects of love rather than opposition.

Q: Who is the little figure in the middle?

Cupid stirs the water in the fountain-sarcophagus. His presence confirms the painting's subject is love. He mediates between the two women, suggesting they're connected rather than opposed.

Italian artist Titian painted this Sacred and Profane Love around 1514 for Niccolò Aurelio, whose coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus-fountain. Two women sit at opposite ends of a marble basin, one clothed and one nude. Despite centuries of interpretation, scholars still debate which represents sacred love and which profane.

The nude figure may represent divine love (truth needs no clothing) while the dressed woman represents earthly attachment. Or the opposite: nudity as sensuality, clothing as virtue. Cupid stirs the water between them, suggesting love's symbolic power. The Venetian landscape glows with golden light. It remains one of the Borghese Gallery's most celebrated paintings.

Scholars still debate this question. The nude may be sacred (heavenly truth) or profane (sensuality). The clothed figure may be virtuous (modesty) or worldly (vanity). Titian may have intended the ambiguity.

The painting likely celebrates marriage and love's symbolic power. It was commissioned for a wedding. The two figures may represent complementary aspects of love rather than opposition.

Cupid stirs the water in the fountain-sarcophagus. His presence confirms the painting's subject is love. He mediates between the two women, suggesting they're connected rather than opposed.

Sacred and Profane Love

Details

Where to See It

The Artist

More by Titian

Christ and the Adulteress

Madonna and Child with Sts Anthony of Padua and Roch

The Concert

The Gipsy Madonna

Also at Borghese Gallery, Rome

Young Sick Bacchus

Melissa (Circe)

Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix

The Hunt of Diana

Related Renaissance Works

The Adoration of the Magi

The Birth of Venus

The Alba Madonna

Pallas and the Centaur

The School of Athens

Sistine Madonna

Laocoön

Salvator Mundi

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