For almost 500 years, a large painting showing two young women at a fountain has been seen as an absolute hymn to beauty and love, executed by the young Titian who had set out to conquer the Venetian art scene. It is a solemn, luminous song, looking onto a bright, harmonious universe; it is the first true masterpiece of the twenty-five-year-old painter who knowingly started revolutionizing the history of painting. As one of his contemporaries said, Titian “walks hand in hand with nature; all of his figures are alive, move, and their flesh quivers.” After changing hands several times among different Venetian collections, it was finally purchased by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1608 for the Roman collection to which it still belongs today. The painting soon lost all ties with the person who commissioned it, and came to be understood as a broad, universal allegory of love, of two possible forms of love; the “sacred” and the “profane”.