Portrait of a Lady in White

Titian painted this around 1561, near the end of a very long life, and nobody knows who she is. A woman in shining white silk, a little fan of feathers in one hand, looking out with complete self-possession. In a letter to King Philip of Spain, Titian mentioned another version of her and called the sitter the absolute mistress of his soul, a phrase that set people guessing for centuries. His daughter Lavinia, a mistress, a young bride, or simply his private idea of beauty, a face he reused in other pictures. The known dates do not fit his daughters well, so the ideal seems likeliest. Augustus, the elector of Saxony, bought her from an Italian collection in 1746, and she has hung in Dresden ever since.