Two painted versions of Isabella d’Este have come to define her association with Titian, although neither records a simple encounter between painter and sitter. One, generally called Isabella in Red, is known principally through a copy made by Peter Paul Rubens after a lost Titian and shows Isabella as a mature woman. The other, Isabella in Black, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, presents her with richly ornamented sleeves, fur and an elaborate headdress, but with the face of a woman far younger than Isabella was when the portrait was painted in the mid-1530s. She was then about sixty. At first the two images seem to offer a choice between age and youth, observation and flattery. Their histories resist so simple a division.
Isabella had been concerned with the making and circulation of her image for much of her adult life, but the surviving correspondence makes it difficult to separate that concern from the political circumstances in which she lived. Married to Francesco II Gonzaga in 1490, she assumed delegated authority while her husband was campaigning during the Italian Wars and governed Mantua during his imprisonment by the Venetians in 1509–10. After Francesco’s death in 1519 she acted as regent for their son Federico until he established his own authority. Carolyn James has argued that Isabella’s portraits should therefore be considered alongside the other means by which a Renaissance ruler might establish magnificence, lineage, prudence and political competence. Her close direction of artists has often been judged more harshly than comparable image-making by male princes.
Dress formed part of the same visual language. Around 1509 Isabella began wearing the distinctive turban-like headdress variously described as the zazara, scuffioto or capigliara, made from interwoven hair and silk ribbons. Its association with her became sufficiently close that Susanna Gonzaga and Laura Bentivoglio sought permission to adopt the fashion and were refused. In 1515 a less resistible request arrived through Isabella’s son Federico. François I wanted a doll dressed in examples of the clothes Isabella wore, together with miniature versions of her headdresses, so that women at the French court could copy them. In 1523 Bona Sforza, queen of Poland, thanked Isabella for six gold-and-silk scuffioti and asked to receive examples of future inventions. Her fashions had acquired a political as well as a fashionable currency beyond Mantua.
For generations, such vigilance was readily explained as vanity. That interpretation owed much to Pietro Aretino, who in 1534 ridiculed the ageing marchioness for attempting to disguise the effects of time. James has shown how readily later scholars accepted his caricature, sometimes treating Isabella’s direction of artists as interference rather than as princely image-making. Aretino’s attack also lies behind the familiar assumption that Isabella commissioned Titian’s later youthful portrait because she disliked an earlier image in which he had shown her as an older woman. Nothing is known of her reaction to that first portrait.
Her attitude towards likeness was more complicated than the charge of vanity implies. Isabella could reject a portrait because she thought it failed to resemble her, while portraits were also used within her family to compare features across generations. Yet she could approve an image that departed conspicuously from physical fact. The two portraits associated with Titian preserve both possibilities.
The earlier portrait has not survived. It is generally dated to about 1529–30, when Titian was working for the Gonzaga court, and the 2004 Ferrara catalogue Gli Este a Ferrara: una corte nel Rinascimento treated it as a portrait painted from life. Isabella, born in 1474, was then in her mid-fifties, and Titian apparently represented her at something approaching her contemporary age.
Its composition is preserved most importantly in Rubens’s Isabella in Red, made around the beginning of the seventeenth century while he was in the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga at Mantua. Rubens copied two Titian portraits of Isabella there, the youthful portrait now in Vienna and the lost image of the older woman. In the surviving copy Isabella appears at three-quarter length in a sumptuous red dress, with pearls and gold ornaments worked into the elaborate headdress.
A seventeenth-century inventory of Titian’s original supplies details that should not be transferred automatically to Rubens’s painting. It described Isabella in an old-fashioned red satin dress, with a fan in her right hand and her left resting in her lap. The fan is not visible in Rubens’s version. The difference is a useful reminder that the copy preserves Titian’s conception without reproducing every feature literally. Titian’s original subsequently entered the collection of Charles I of England and was dispersed after the king’s execution.
Rubens’s painting should therefore be treated as a translation rather than a facsimile. The Kunsthistorisches Museum has emphasised the greater splendour and bodily amplitude he gave Titian’s Isabella in accordance with his own pictorial language. The Vienna exhibition catalogue Isabella d’Este: La prima donna del mondo. Fürstin und Mäzenatin der Renaissance, edited by Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, develops the point further. The richness of the red costume, the glittering pearls and gold, the rosy complexion and the soft modelling of the face belong in part to Rubens’s early seventeenth-century conception of princely femininity. Isabella has become fuller and more opulent without becoming a caricature.
Rubens has consequently preserved the lost composition without providing transparent access to Titian’s canvas, still less to Isabella herself. Even the portrait that apparently stood closest to her appearance in middle age has reached us through another painter, working roughly seventy years later.
The youthful portrait had a different and more elaborate genealogy. In 1534 Isabella arranged for Titian to work not from a new sitting but from a portrait Francesco Francia had painted in 1511, when she was about thirty-seven. Francia had likewise worked without Isabella before him. She had refused to sit, and he instead relied on an earlier portrait by Lorenzo Costa while Isabella’s half-sister Lucrezia d’Este Bentivoglio acted as intermediary and supplied verbal guidance about her appearance.
When Francia’s portrait reached Mantua, Isabella acknowledged that it bore little resemblance to her but praised the painter for making her much more beautiful than nature had. She nevertheless considered asking for the colour of her eyes to be altered, before accepting Lucrezia’s advice that further work might disturb the painting. Isabella later gave the portrait to the Ferrarese courtier Gian Francesco Zaninello. More than twenty years afterwards it was recovered from his heirs and sent to Venice for Titian to use. Titian’s model was therefore a portrait whose idealisation Isabella had recognised and approved, itself dependent upon an earlier likeness and the recollections of someone who knew her.
Francis Ames-Lewis has emphasised that such mediation was not unusual in Renaissance portraiture. Painted likenesses could be constructed from drawings or earlier portraits, supplemented by verbal description and remembered appearance. Exact physiognomic correspondence was only one of the things a portrait might provide. Beauty, nobility, rank and social identity could also belong to its claim to truth.
The resulting Isabella in Black does not advertise this complicated ancestry. Isabella appears composed and youthful, seated in a three-quarter-length pose against a dark background. Her black bodice is set against richly patterned blue sleeves worked with gold and silver, while white fur falls across one shoulder. Pearls and jewels ornament the headdress. James describes Isabella as firmly grasping a rosary and reads it as a sign of piety within a display otherwise marked by magnificence. She also draws attention to the fine balance between the exposed skin at the neckline and the stiff posture and indirect gaze that maintain decorum and wifely chastity. The elaborate zazara, meanwhile, recalls the coiffures of Roman imperial women and renews classical associations already present in earlier images of Isabella.
The portrait was finished by the spring of 1536. On 29 May Isabella wrote to the Mantuan ambassador in Venice that it pleased her greatly, adding, with some humour, that she doubted she had ever possessed at the age represented the beauty Titian had given her. Her response acknowledged the idealisation rather than mistaking it for recovered physical fact.
That response belongs within a broader Renaissance understanding of portraiture. Beverly Louise Brown has argued that sixteenth-century discussions of female portraiture did not bind truthfulness to exact physiognomic reproduction. Petrarchan ideas of beauty allowed art to improve upon nature, while writers such as Paolo Pino and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo accepted the correction of physical imperfections in pursuit of a more perfect image. Idealisation did not in itself disqualify a portrait from being considered true.
The point has a particular bearing on Titian. Paul Joannides has emphasised his ability to construct the identity of a sitter through costume, pose and expression as well as resemblance. Titian was also sufficiently confident in this process to portray people he had never seen. Joannides cites the profile portrait of François I, devised from verbal information and a medal, and compares that reconstruction with Isabella, whom Titian knew only in middle age but represented as a much younger woman.
Brown has seen the Vienna portrait as a more durable conception of Isabella, in which beauty accompanies intelligence and inward resolution. James makes that interpretation more historically specific. The rejuvenated figure may recall the years in which Isabella exercised some of her most conspicuous political responsibilities, maintaining the Gonzaga regime through the disruptions of the Italian Wars and displaying the prudence and fortitude expected of a ruler. Youth, on this reading, evokes an earlier history of political competence as well as physical beauty.
The portrait may also have participated in the dynastic transition taking place around Isabella during the 1530s. James notes affinities with Giulio Romano’s Portrait of a Woman, probably Margherita Paleologo, whose sitter, if the identification is correct, married Isabella’s son Federico Gonzaga in 1531. There is no evidence that Titian had seen Giulio’s painting, and James allows that the relationship may instead have arisen through Isabella’s instructions.
The similarities are nevertheless specific. Both women have centrally parted hair and corkscrew curls, wear related zazare with prominent jewels, pearl earrings and embroidered chemises, and are presented seated at three-quarter length with their elbows resting on a partly visible chair. Both hold a rosary in the right hand. Some of Margherita’s clothing may itself preserve the character of sartorial gifts received from Isabella. James reads these shared visual codes as communicating magnificence, intelligence, prudence and piety, perhaps presenting the younger woman as a political and dynastic successor to her mother-in-law.
One uncertainty remains over the Vienna painting itself. Francesco Valcanover, comparing it with Titian’s slightly later Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere in the Uffizi, questioned whether the surviving canvas was entirely autograph. He thought Isabella awkwardly placed within the chair and found the drawing of the balzo, coiffure, costume and especially the hands less assured than he would expect from Titian. The colour also appeared to him comparatively coarse and hurried. Since Titian’s other portraits made from pre-existing models do not generally show such weaknesses, Valcanover raised the possibility that the Vienna painting might be a workshop repetition of a lost original. The Kunsthistorisches Museum and subsequent cataloguing have continued to attribute it to Titian, so his proposal remains a dissenting one.
Whether or not Valcanover’s suspicion is accepted, Isabella’s letter of 1536 remains the most direct contemporary response to the youthful conception. She recognised the extent of Titian’s transformation and welcomed it. Seen beside Rubens’s later version of the older Isabella, the portrait makes it difficult to separate likeness neatly from invention. One image reaches us through a painter working decades after Titian’s lost original. The other was itself constructed from earlier portraits, remembered appearance, clothing and instruction, and may even survive through a workshop repetition. What endures is not a single recoverable face, but the image Isabella helped to fashion of herself as magnificent, cultivated and capable of rule.
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Bibliography
The following sources were consulted. Any errors are mine.
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