Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, 1514, commissioned by Niccoló Aurelio

Sacred and Profane Love (also called Venus and the Bride) is an oil painting by Titian, painted around 1513–1514. The painting was commissioned by Niccolò Aurelio,^[1] a secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten (so identified because his coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus or fountain in the centre of the image) to celebrate his marriage to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto.^[2] It supposedly depicts the bride dressed in white, sitting beside Cupid and being assisted by Venus in person.

Art critics have made several analyses and interpretations, among them are: Ingenious Love and Satisfied Love; Prudery and Love; the wise and foolish virgins;^[3] the dressed Aphrodite Pandemos (left) opposite the nude Urania.^[4] or that it contains a coded message about Bagarotto's father's innocence.^[2] Nadia Gaus notes that while the title might at first lead one to view the left hand woman as the sacred one, further thought leads to the opposite interpretation: the well dressed woman is Profane Love while the nude woman is Sacred Love.^[1] The title itself of the painting is uncertain: in 1693 it was listed as Amor Divino e Amor Profano (Divine love and Profane love).^[4]

The first record of the work under its popular title is in an inventory of 1693, although scholars now discredit the theory that the two female figures are personifications of the Neoplatonic concepts of sacred and profane love. The art historian Walter Friedländer outlined similarities between the painting and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and proposed that the two figures represented Polia and Venere, the two female characters in the 1499 romance. It has been suggested that the scholar Pietro Bembo devised the allegorical scheme.