While most of Titian's nudes in his Poesie series serve as idealized, eroticized figures, “The Rape of Europa” serves as a divergent example. Europa is not an idealized, simple, composition and instead complicates the Poesie narrative with her naturalism. I intend to look into the contradictory analysis of this painting and use my own visual analysis of the painting in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to come to my conclusion. Some of the contradictory elements I have found in this painting include Titian’s working of the body; in Renaissance art women were usually portrayed in an extremely unrealistic, elongated, idealized, and beautiful way. I want to know why Titian portrays Europa as compact, ungainly, and with a shadowed, dubiously
