Titian

For a long time this was just filed as 'Portrait of a Man' — someone eventually managed to make out the barely-legible letter he's holding, addressed to himself, and that's apparently how they worked out who he was.

Nobody actually knows who she is. She gets called Venus by tradition, from what I can find, but there's no story attached — just a young woman on a bed in a grand house, a sleeping dog, and two maids in the back digging through a chest like it's any other afternoon. It sat finished for years before anyone bought it, apparently.

Apparently X-rays show he first painted the two of them sitting upright and stiff, almost like a formal icon, before loosening it into this warmer, cuddled-up pose.

They say experts spent decades arguing over who even painted this — one called it Giorgione, another said Palma il Vecchio — before most eventually came round to the name on the card now.

Apparently this is one of his earliest known paintings — from back when he was still learning from a couple of older Venetian painters.