The two young women in a state of undress are accompanied by an older maidservant, whose swarthy skin, marked with facial tattoos, serves as a foil for their own fair, pink and white complexions. Despite the unrealistic elaborateness of the background architecture, which resembles the façade of a building in the tradition of Pietro Lombardo rather than a domestic interior, the scene is suggestive of the intimacy of a bedchamber. The accessories of feminine toilet — a mirror, an ointment jar and a comb — are spread out in the foreground. Yet the young women are not entirely absorbed in what should be a private activity, and both are clearly conscious of being watched and admired. Only half-covering her nakedness with a silken drapery, the beauty on the right looks archly over her shoulder to meet the gaze of the implicitly male spectator, while her companion in the middle displays herself with even less pretence of modesty.
The picture belongs in the tradition of the half-length 'bella donna', a type that was made popular in Venice in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century by such painters as Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian and Palma Vecchio. The most relevant prototype for Bordon's picture is Titian's Woman at her Toilet of about 1514 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), in which a mirror is held up for the central figure by a male admirer while she dresses her hair. However, Titian's eroticism is much more subtle than that of Bordon, and the more blatantly provocative aspects of the Venetian Women at their Toilet owe more to the example of Palma Vecchio in the early 1520s: Woman in Profile (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), who looks coquettishly over her shoulder like Paris's woman; or the so-called Cortigiana (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan), who although wearing a fashionable dress, has her chemise open to reveal her naked breasts. Palma also anticipated Bordon in widening the format to include three figures, as in his so-called Three Sisters (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). Palma did not, however, go as far as Bordon in emphasising the genre-like aspect of the 'beautiful woman' type; the younger artist here transformed it into what appears to be a scene from everyday life, set in the boudoir of a pair of Venetian courtesans with their procuress. A type of image that in the art of Titian had provided a focus for male romantic and poetic longings thus became in Paris Bordon's work a source of more straightforward sexual titillation.
In this context it is not easy to decide how far the accessories of toilet are also meant to be read allegorically. The ointment jar, for example, was a standard attribute of Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of courtesans, but its presence here may simply be functional. The mirror may be a vanitas motif, alluding to the transience of female beauty, but this point could have been made more tellingly if the maidservant, or procuress, had been portrayed as a wrinkled hag instead of as an only slightly older woman. Yet in favour of an allegorical interpretation of the jar and mirror is the consideration that the Picture's patron, while doubtless attracted chiefly by eroticism of the subject, may nevertheless have preferred to retain some sort of message by way of justification. Similarly, the understated allusion to the mythological theme of the toilet of Venus would have provided a welcome dimension of classical erudition.
Usually and convincingly dated to the 1540’s picture is probably approximately contemporary with Paris's The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, as well as with the Perseus armed by Mercury and Minerva (Alabama Museum of Art, Birmingham) and a number of other mythological-allegorical subjects showing a trio of figures three-quarter length in a broad format. By the 1540s Bordon's style had become much harder and more contortedly linear than in his earlier, more Titianesque period, partly in response to an exposure to central Italian Mannerism. The frozen rigidity of the pose of the central woman and the Michelangelesque muscularity of her arms continues nevertheless to co-exist with a characteristically Venetian evocation of the softness of her thick-piled, red velvet gown.
The Venetian Women at their Toilet is first recorded by Carlo Ridolfi in 1648, in the ornate palace of the nouveau riche Widmann family at San Canciano in Venice, which had recently been rebuilt by Baldassare Longhena. It is again recorded there in an inventory of 1649, but after the death in the following year of Cardinal Cristoforo Widmann, it was apparently sold to the Genoese nobleman, Giuseppe Maria Durazzo. It then reappears in the palace of Giovanni Battista Grimaldi in Genoa at the end of the eighteenth century, before being sold by the Marchesa Grimaldi Pallavicini to Andrew Wilson, acting on behalf of the Royal Institution in Edinburgh. Visiting the Royal Institution in 1851, G.F. Waagen admired 'the animation and luminous flesh tones' typical of Bordon, but judged it to belong 'to his somewhat gaudy works’.
Professor Peter Humfrey
This text was first published in The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art From Scottish Collections, 2004.
Published online 2016/17