Editor Rona Goffen has done a superb job anthologizing some of the most insightful scholarship surrounding one of the most impressive works of the Western cannon. Goffen (Rutgers), an expert on Titian's Venetian milieu, has carefully selected excerpts from some of the finest contemporary scholarship including such prominent names as T.J. Clark (Berkley), Carlo Ginzburg (UCLA) and David Rosand (Columbia). This collection of essays seeks to place the Venus in its social context by focusing on gender roles of sixteenth-century Venice. This discourse includes a broad discussion of the role of women in both marriage and as courtesan.

Ginzburg offers an insightful study of Titian's relationship to sixteenth-century sexual codes, focusing on his relationship to Ovid.

Rosand deals with the question of genre with regard to the reclining Venus which becomes so important in Titian's art after the Urbino painting.

Arasse focuses on a semiotic reading of the painting, while Pardo and Goffen both try to contextualize Venus's sexuality.

T.J. Clark's chapter, which is taken from his book The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, 1984), offers a reflection on Manet's Olympia and its significant references toward the Venus of Urbino.

This book is absolutely wonderful! It is rare to find such an insightful anthology of critical that is also such an easy read. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Titian and the Venetian school. Its only draw back is that the essays are not reprinted in their entirety.

In appreciation of beauty, perhaps the only difference between a layperson and an artist is that the latter can see and openly render that beauty. Unfortunately, sometimes "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Beautiful paintings of women by this ingenius artist has been considered (by some) in the same class with eroticism, or even pornography.
Titian is noted for his radiant and sensual rendering of human flesh. The effects are achieved by painstaking efforts in glazing, scumbling, and manipulation of colors. As a lady's man himself, Titian "loves every woman he meets" (although he reportedly was heartbroken at his wife's death), recognizes their beauty (after all, beauty is indifferent to social bias in this artist's eye), and expresses maverlously their charm in his paintings.
The readers will get it all in this book and if social convention has a problem mistaking artistic appreciation with mundane eroticism, then so what is new?