 Next the figures, who seem physically identical, but whose clothing is so different, need to be assigned identities, at which point agreement ends.While the trend in recent years has been to downplay complicated and obscure explanations of the iconography of paintings by Titian (and other Venetian painters), in this case no straightforward interpretation has been found, and scholars remain more ready to consider allegorical alternatives of some complexity, and to consider that "some paintings are enigmatic, even ambiguous "ab initio", and no meaning derived from, or assigned to them, can ever be definitive".Titian would probably not have devised a complicated allegorical meaning himself; it has been suggested that the Renaissance humanist scholar Cardinal Pietro Bembo, or a similar figure, may have devised the allegorical scheme.