According to art historian Anne Christine Junkerman, 16^th-century Venetian women were judged solely on the societal standard of chastity, a virtue that females were supposed to personify.¹   If a woman had one misdemeanor that countered chastity, then her virtue was completely lost in the eyes of 16^th-century society.  The standard was well known because it was visible everywhere; civic law, church doctrine, and literature are a few examples.²  Giorgione (1477/8 – 1510), who influenced Titian, painted Laura with this idea of chastity in mind.  The portrait depicts a woman in half-length and in three-quarter view.  The background is dark with some laurel leaves behind her head and body.  She wears a fur robe and a bare breast is visible.  A moral controversy unfolded because viewers could not easily identify whether Laura (as a subject) was a chaste or corrupt woman due to the blunt nudity.

Recent studies remark that a laurel plant in conjunction with the naked breast symbolized faithful conjugal virtues within a marriage.³  Therefore, Laura represents a sexual, but chaste being.  She is an allegory of a good wife because in the privacy of her own home she is a sexual being for her husband, but when in public, her robe covers her bare breast which would otherwise be corrupt.⁴

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1. Anne Christine Junkerman, “The Lady and the Laurel:  Gender and Meaning in Giorgione’s Laura,”  The Oxford Art Journal (16, 1993), 49-51.
2. Junkerman, 51.
3. Junkerman, 51.
4. Junkerman, 51.