A nude woman sleeps on white satin spread over the grass, her head tilted against a deep red cushion, one arm bent behind her head and her other hand resting low on her body. Behind her, green hills roll away to a hillside farm with pitched roofs at the right, a lone tree and pale mountains at the horizon, under a sky of heaped clouds. The Dresden museum says Girolamo Marcello probably commissioned the painting from Giorgione for his marriage in 1507, and suggests he may have had in mind Latin wedding poems in which the sleeping Venus is asked to wake and attend the feast. It describes the picture as the first large-scale female nude painted in Venice.

A document of 1525 reports that Giorgione began it and his associate Titian finished it, but after many restorations it is impossible to say which parts each painted. A Cupid who once sat at her feet, playing with a bow and arrow, was painted over with the green of the meadow in 1837 because of his poor condition; fragments of him still show in X-rays. In July 1945 Soviet trophy brigades took the painting to the USSR, and it returned to Dresden in 1956. It is in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.