reclining female nude in the Venetian style. After Giorgione's death in 1510 Titian had completed his Dresden Venus, and then around 1534 had painted the Venus of Urbino. A repetition of this from 1545, perhaps a lost recorded Venus sent to Charles V, "was the basis" for the Venus and Musician series. Unlike these, the Cupid in most versions of Venus and Musician does allow a clear identification of the female as Venus, despite the modern decor. Otherwise the painting falls into the category showing courtesans, though these are also often described as "Venus", if only to retain some propriety. In all an unembarrassed Venus is completely naked, except for a gauzy cloth over her crotch in some versions, but wears several pieces of very expensive jewellery, typical aspects of courtesan pictures. The musician is smartly dressed, and carries a blade weapon, in several versions a large sword with gilded fittings. He could be taken as the client of an expensive Venetian courtesan. Other reclining nudes are the Pardo Venus (or Jupiter and Antiope, now in the Louvre), "that laboured attempt to recapture his early style", from the mid-1540s. A more original composition and physique, also begun in the mid-1540s, but with versions painted in the 1550s and perhaps 1560s, is used in the series of Danaë paintings, which Kenneth Clark sees as Titian adopting the conventions for the nude prevailing outside Venice; "in the rest of Italy bodies of an entirely different shape had long been fashionable". For Clark, the Venus of the Venus and Musician versions, where the head changes direction but the body remains exactly the same, is "entirely Venetian, younger sister of all those expensive ladies whom Palma Vecchio, Paris Bordone and Bonifazio painted for local consumption." The nude figures are "rich, heavy and a trifle coarse ... the Venuses of this series are not provocative. The almost brutal directness with which their bodies are presented to us makes them, now that their delicate texture has been removed by restoration, singularly un-aphrodisiac. Moreover, they are far more conventionalized than is evident at first sight." Allegory? The erotic appeal of the subject is evident, but some critics have argued for a more allegorical meaning to do with the appreciation of beauty through both the eyes and ears, and the superiority of the former. Whereas the two Prado organists still seem to be playing, with one hand on