Focus on Sleeping Venus (Giorgione) and explore the History.
According to the usual account, the painting was unfinished at the time of Giorgione's death. The landscape and sky were later finished by Titian, who in 1534 painted the similar Venus of Urbino, and several other reclining female nudes, such as his much repeated Venus and Musician and Danaë compositions, both from the 1540s onwards.  Other elements reused by Titian are the mountains on the horizon at left, which reappear in The Gypsy Madonna (c. 1511, Vienna) and the buildings on the right, seen again in the Noli me tangere of c. 1514 (National Gallery).The painting is usually identified with one, including a Cupid, described in the collection of Girolamo Marcello in 1525 by Marcantonio Michiel, a Venetian patrician interested in art, who left notes compiled between about 1521 and 1543 on paintings he saw.  He describes the painting as by Giorgione, but with the landscape completed by Titian, and until very recently this double attribution has been generally accepted, despite art historians knowing that "Giorgiones" were already rare and over-attributed even by this early date.  At least by the time Carlo Ridolfi saw the Marcello painting, about a century later, Cupid was holding a bird, whereas in the Dresden painting (viewed in x-rays) he seems to be pointing his bow, perhaps at the viewer, although his pose is hard to decipher.  It remains possible that the Marcello painting is not in fact the one now in Dresden, or that it is, but that the information Michiel was presumably given as to its authorship is incorrect.Marcello married in 1507, and it has been suggested that he commissioned the painting to celebrate this; the suitability of a reclining nude as a marriage picture has also been explored in connection with the Venus of Urbino.The painting was bought from a French dealer for Augustus the Strong of Saxony in 1695 as a Giorgione, but by 1722 was described in a catalogue as the "Famous Venus lying in a landscape by Titian".  By the early 19th century it was thought to be a copy after Titian.  It was not identified with the painting Michiel saw before the 19th century, when Giovanni Morelli proposed this, following which Michiel's attribution to Giorgione, with a Titian landscape, was mostly accepted for over a century.  Any underdrawing was lost when the painting was transferred to a new canvas, probably in the early 19th century.
Augustus the Strong Cupid Titian National Gallery Venus and Musician Venus of Urbino Danaë Marcantonio Michiel Carlo Ridolfi The Gypsy Madonna Dresden Noli me tangere underdrawing Giovanni Morelli Vienna Giorgione