Now in his early fifties, Niccolò Aurelio had fallen in love with Laura Bagarotto, a young and beautiful Paduan widow, who on the face of it could hardly have been a less suitable match. Laura’s late father, Dr Bertuccio Bagarotto, a Paduan nobleman, had been a lawyer and professor of canonical jurisprudence at the University of Padua, and a man of considerable means. But Dr Bagarotto, and some of her other blood relatives – including her maternal uncle, her cousin, her brother and her illegitimate half-brother – as well as her late husband, Francesco Borromeo, were among the members of the Paduan elite who had been singled out as traitors for supporting the short-lived imperialist occupation of their city in the summer of 1509. Within days of the recapture of Padua the family, including Laura, had been rounded up, sent under guard to Venice and thrown into prison. There was a debate in government about whether, given the status of the family, it would be more appropriate to strangle them privately in prison rather than hang them in public. Some escaped or were pardoned. But Laura’s uncle, father and husband were condemned to death, and on 1 December Dr Bagarotto was escorted from prison and hanged between the columns on the Piazzetta. He died protesting his innocence, while Laura and her mother were forced to watch his execution. Her brother, who had been spared, continued to work for the restoration of the family’s good name, and he seems eventually to have succeeded because his late father’s state pension was restored to him in 1519. Meanwhile, however, the family property, including their house in Padua near the Eremitani and Laura’s substantial dowry, was confiscated; and when in 1510 the Council of Ten decreed that the dowries of Paduan rebels be restored to their widows, Laura’s was not among them.
On the day before their marriage on 17 May 1514 Aurelio arranged for the return of her dowry. Valued at 2,100 ducats, it consisted of a white satin gown (which she had probably worn for her first marriage), twenty-five pearls and some real estate near Padua. Any increase in the value of her estate would become the property of her husband, and Aurelio did later develop the land with walled stone buildings. Although the Collegio granted approval of the marriage (another indication that there were doubts about the guilt of the family), the marriage of Laura Bagarotto and Niccolò Aurelio was the scandal of the year. Everyone talked about it, as Sanudo indicated when recording the ‘noteworthy’ event. Had Aurelio married for money? Although his job was well paid, he had no independent means, and his salary was stretched to the limit by the need to provide dowries for two sisters. He had lived with his brother in a house rented for only two ducats a year. Like so many Venetian men he had remained a bachelor, although he had fathered an illegitimate son. Had Laura married him as a means of reclaiming her dowry? Was the young Laura, who had suffered so much tragedy, attracted by the security and respectability of a middle-aged husband with an important job in government? Or was it a marriage of passion? In the three wills he made in the 1520s Aurelio refers to Laura as his most dear, beloved and cherished consort, whom he cannot imagine wanting to remarry after his death. He also expresses tenderness for the entire family, especially their daughter Giulietta, as well as for his natural son Marco and for Francesco, the natural son of his deceased brother Antonio, both of whom Laura had helped to bring up.
In August 1523, nearly a decade after their marriage, Aurelio was elected grand chancellor by the Great Council. It was the top job in the Venetian bureaucracy, carried a salary of 300 ducats per year plus bonuses, and made Aurelio the most powerful man in government after the doge and the procurators. He beat five other candidates – one of whom, Gasparo di la Vedoa, was the doge’s favourite. Sanudo described Vedoa’s black face when he heard he had failed to carry the election, and such was his distress that he died the next year. Aurelio’s victory enraged a cabal of the losers, and less than a year later his enemies trumped up charges that he had accepted bribes to allow some criminals to escape justice. On 15 June 1524, after attending a banquet with Laura, rumours reached him of a plot. In July he was arrested, tortured on the rack and banished to Treviso for life. But a year later, possibly thanks to an intervention by Bembo, he was permitted to go to Padua, where he was reunited with Laura, who soon bore him a son, Antonio. But Niccolò Aurelio was a broken man. He died on 17 June 1531. Sanudo tells us that Laura honoured his wish to be buried in San Giorgio Maggiore and that it poured with rain on the day of his funeral. She never remarried.1
Titian immortalized the love story of Laura Bagarotto and Niccolò Aurelio with a painting that is one of the icons of Italian Renaissance art.2 The earliest references to it are relatively straightforward. In the years after its arrival in the Villa Borghese in the seventeenth century, it was called ‘Beauty Adorned and Unadorned’ and ‘Divine Love and Profane Love, with Cupid fishing in a basin’. Ridolfi described it as ‘two ladies near a spring in which a child is looking at itself’. The title Sacred and Profane was attached to the painting in the eighteenth century. But it was not until the end of nineteenth century that art historians educated in the classics began their attempts to possess by explanation this last and greatest of Titian’s Giorgionesque secular paintings with more and less arcane theories about its meaning and the classical or Renaissance stories it might illustrate.3 Although few have doubted that the naked woman in the painting is Venus, some have seen the two women as representing her double role as goddess of both chastity and carnal love. Some, taking their cue from the eighteenth-century title of the painting, have seen the naked Venus as ‘sacred’ in the sense that she is the celestial goddess of unadorned truth and the higher love, while her clothed counterpart is an earth-bound mortal and therefore ‘profane’.
A more recent and more plausible interpretation4 inverts that theory. Venus may have been the most beautiful of goddesses, but she was notorious for sleeping around and was for that reason the goddess of whores as well as of brides. According to the Neoplatonic theory of love then being propagated by Bembo and Castiglione, carnal love, as encouraged by Venus and her son Cupid, leads step by step to the ideal love in which raging passion, harnessed by the human intellect and capacity for discipline, ascends to the perfect love of God and to Christian marriage in which the purpose of sexual relations is to produce children. It is the clothed bride in Titian’s painting who represents that ideal of what has been called a ‘baptized eros’.5 If this is indeed the meaning of Titian’s painting it could have been suggested by Pietro Bembo’s famous and widely read Gli Asolani, in which a party of young friends discuss the nature of profane and sacred love. Bembo was, as it happened, in Venice at the time of the marriage, travelling on a diplomatic mission, and he would certainly have given a wedding present to his friend Niccolò Aurelio. Poems in praise of marriage were traditional wedding gifts. Bembo, who was also acquainted with Titian, and was not lacking in imagination or appreciation for the art of painting, might have decided instead on a painted poem. If so, we have the greatest Venetian poet of his day to thank for the most sublime Venetian painting about love and marriage.6
The link with Niccolò Aurelio was not rediscovered until the early twentieth century when Sanudo’s diaries were first published7 and a scholar matched the escutcheon on the front of the fountain to an engraving of the Aurelio family coat of arms. More recently, thanks to the interest of academic historians in the material culture of the Renaissance, scholars have noticed what would have been immediately obvious to any sixteenth-century Venetian who saw the painting in the Aurelio household. Sacred and Profane Love is an epithalamium, a poem about a marriage, in the same tradition as Botticelli’s Primavera.8 Venetian brides did not necessarily wear white. Their wedding dresses could be any colour, the main requirement being that they were made of expensive materials and worn with ornate jewellery.9 Titian originally dressed his bride in the red that can still be detected beneath the white he painted over it. She wears the belt, or ceston, that refers to the girdle of Venus, which had the power to bestow sexual attraction on its wearer, but was also a sign of the bride’s chastity; it would have been sent by her betrothed as