Isabella d'Este

A woman in red velvet against a turquoise ground, a balzo on her head. Rubens copied her from a lost Titian, and who she really is has puzzled the museum that owns her ever since.

The story behind the painting

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Rubens was court painter in Mantua, and there and later elsewhere he copied Italian masters, Titian among them. This portrait, also called Isabella in Red or Portrait of the Aged Isabella d'Este, is considered a close copy of a lost Titian original. The dates are uncertain on both sides: the Rubens copy is placed in 1600, around 1605 or later, and the Titian original anywhere between 1524 and 1536 depending on the source. After Rubens died, his inventory listed two copies by his hand of Titian portraits of Isabella d'Este. The painting later passed from Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

What to look for

The picture is a knee-length portrait of a somewhat chubby middle-aged woman in a red velvet dress, set before a turquoise background. On her head she wears a balzo, a fashionable headdress that Isabella d'Este herself invented around 1509 and which was widely worn in northern Italy in the 1530s. Look at the personal features that matter so much to the identity debate: reddish-brown curls, brown eyes and classically arched eyebrows. The red of the velvet against the cool turquoise gives the portrait its warmth, and its name, Isabella in Red.

Meaning and intent

The Kunsthistorisches Museum shows three coloured portraits identified as Isabella d'Este (1474 to 1539): the Ambras Miniature, this Isabella in Red, and Titian's Isabella in Black. Their features contradict each other, and the differences cannot be explained by flattery. Because of the confusion, other museums have withdrawn colour identifications. The trouble may start with the 1640 inventory after Rubens's death, which names both pictures, and with the habit of calling any sitter in a balzo after the famous patron. Either Isabella in Black is misidentified, or both Isabella in Red and the Ambras Miniature are.

Legacy

The evidence favours this painting. Two older copies of the lost Titian exist independently of Rubens: a workshop copy with a younger face, known from a photograph, and an anonymous sixteenth-century copy in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool inscribed Isabella Estensis. The Ambras Miniature, a Mantuan copy about a generation later, also carries the inscription Isabella Estensis and shares her features. Some experts have therefore published that the confusion lies with Isabella in Black. So Rubens's copy, made to study Titian, may be one of our best guides to what Isabella looked like.