It was considered a fake for a century, but now one of the UK’s greatest art treasures is back on show. So how did the Duke of Wellington get his hands on it?



Britain’s sexiest art treasure is the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Apsley House, home of the Duke of Wellington and now in the care of English Heritage. This is a painting about love and money – and it is priceless. But until recently, it lay almost unnoticed among Wellington’s paintings.

The story of this erotic masterpiece begins with a cardinal, a prostitute and a painter. In the 16th century, the great Venetian artist Titian set up his studio in Rome. He was there to paint a lavish nude for the pleasure of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, one of the richest men in Italy and someone who didn’t let clerical office restrain his libido. In fact, the model for Titian’s painting has been identified as Farnese’s mistress, Angela, a famous courtesan.

That would make sense, for the painting Titian created is, among other things, a joke about prostitution. It is a picture of Danaë, mother of the Greek mythical hero Perseus, receiving her lover Zeus. In one of his trademark transformations, Zeus takes the form of a shower of gold. As Danaë reclines on her richly furnished bed, displaying a body that Titian makes both grand and sexy, gold coins fall from above. Is this the money Farnese paid his professional lover?

This painting was intended to be erotic. A report to Farnese assured him it would make Titian’s famous nude, the Venus of Urbino, “look like a nun”.

'This erotic painting was intended to make Titian’s famous nude, the Venus of Urbino, look like a nun'

Danaë was so famous – even Michelangelo paid a visit to Titian’s studio to see it, although he sneered on the way home that Titian could not draw – that other wealthy art lovers paid Titian to create more versions of it. The first version, the one for Farnese, is in the Museo di Capodimonte, in Naples. Another is in the Prado, in Madrid, and yet another in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Arguably, the most significant of them all is in Apsley House, at 149 Piccadilly, London.

Titian’s greatest achievement is a cycle of paintings he created in Venice to send to Philip II, king of Spain and the architect of the Spanish Armada. These “poesie”, as Titian called them, are simply the most beautiful paintings of classical mythology. They include The Rape of Europa in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, which were bought for the UK after a popular appeal and are shared by the national galleries in London and Edinburgh.

We are talking class-A art.

The first mythological picture Titian sent Philip II was a new version of Danaë. This was once thought to be the work in the Prado. But one art historian – Paul Joannides of Cambridge University – suggested it was a later work by Titian, and that the one he sent Philip is in Apsley House. This was dismissed as eccentric. Then, in 2013, the Prado borrowed the Apsley House painting, cleaned it, analysed and proved it actually is Titian’s original. A painting regarded for the whole of the 20th century as a fake is now considered one of Titian’s key works, and therefore one of Britain’s greatest art treasures.

But how did the victor of Waterloo get his hands on it? Wellington’s first great victory was in the war to drive Napoleon’s forces out of Spain. When Joseph Bonaparte, delegated by his brother to rule Spain, finally had to flee, he took a load of paintings from the Spanish royal collection. Abandoning this heavy artistic baggage, he left it to the English. Rightly or wrongly, a grateful Spanish king said Wellington could keep these paintings.

That’s why Apsley House is one of Britain’s great, if lesser known, art museums. Wellington’s stash included The Water Seller of Seville, by Velázquez, and now Danaë, the most glamorous of old master paintings.

If looking at naked women is not your thing, you may prefer Canova’s colossal nude statue of Napoleon in the Apsley stairwell. Wellington knew his art. He also knew his enemy – in explicit detail.

