From Titian’s Venus to the sex on our screens, we have the same uneasy view of pornography

Mark Twain described it as “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses”. Titian’s Venus of Urbino, painted in the 1530s and now hanging in the Uffizi Gallery where I saw it recently, probably has a fair claim to being one of the Western world’s first truly pornographic pictures.

It goes a step further than all of the allegorical Venuses that went before – Aphrodite disturbed while bathing, Boticelli’s Venus perched demurely on a shell – by moving the nude into a bedroom, having her gaze coyly at the viewer and placing her left hand lazily over her nether regions.

Even in an age awash with erotica and pornography and even among schoolchildren who are supposedly inundated with obscene images every day, Titian’s Venus exudes a certain magnetic power. People traipsing along the Uffizi’s long corridors stop to gaze and, even though that’s what we’re meant to do in a gallery, it

For periods of time it has been covered up to avoid offending the prudish

somehow feels improper.

For periods of its history, it has been covered up to avoid offending the prudish sensibilities of people like Twain.

Despite Titian’s decision to throw in some symbols of marital fidelity and motherhood alongside the nude (a little dog sleeping nearby, a young maid presided over by an older one in the background), the picture isn’t exactly subtle. It only remained for Manet to add a choker and high heels to his own version, Olympia, 300 years later and the modern pornographic aesthetic was born. Titian’s Venus of Urbino causes viewers to gaze, even though it somehow feels improper

It took half as long to go from Olympia to

Playboy to Stormy Daniels and the infiltration of all mass culture by hypersexualised images and stories. We are now in a rather strange state, in which flirting at work can get you hounded out of a job while our evening TV screens are filled with images that would make Titian blush. We continue to play the same game of suppression and expression. Perhaps that’s why the

Venus of Urbino still has us rapt.