Die Eitelkeit

Titian painted this around 1515, when he was a young man in Venice and kept returning to the same red-blonde model, the woman who also appears as Flora and in his Sacred and Profane Love from these same years. She holds up a mirror, and in it you catch jewels and a second, smaller reflection, the usual signal that beauty and riches do not last. For a long time nobody was even sure it was his. The first record, from 1748, gave it to another painter entirely, and it passed through attributions to Palma, Giorgione and others before settling on Titian. It has hung in Munich since 1884.