Idealised Portrait of Queen Isabella I of Castile (?)

Three different women have been named as the sitter of this small oak panel, and the museum still puts a question mark after the latest. In 1915 the art historian Max Friedländer took her for Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess sent to England as a bride, painted around 1500. Later the scholar Paul Matthews argued for Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, painted around 1514 while her marriage was being negotiated, and that name is still on the museum's German label.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum now proposes a third reading, an idealised portrait of Queen Isabella of Castile from about 1503, near the end of her life, which would explain why the face is so much younger than the queen was. The clues on the panel do not settle it. A letter K is worked into her necklace and a C sits at her breastbone, and her bodice is bordered with scallop shells, the emblem of Saint James, patron saint of Spain. The panel came to Vienna from the collection at Ambras Castle in the Tyrol.