Bildnis der Isabella von Portugal

Isabella of Portugal had been dead for nine years when Titian painted this in 1548. Her husband, the Emperor Charles V, was in Augsburg for an imperial diet and asked Titian to make a likeness of the wife he had lost in 1539. The painter had never met her. He worked from an earlier portrait he thought poor, and from the emperor's own memory, building this calm figure beside a window that opens onto a distant landscape. Charles kept the picture with him for the rest of his life and carried it into his retirement at the monastery of Yuste. Her hands rest quietly on a book in her lap.