Portrait of Isabella d'Este

When Titian painted this in the mid-1530s, Isabella d'Este, the marchioness of Mantua and one of the sharpest art collectors in Italy, was about 62 years old. You would never guess it. She had already sat for an earlier portrait and hated it for making her look her age, so she commissioned this one and asked to be shown as she had looked some 40 years before. Titian obliged. He gives her a fresh, unlined face, a fur wrap, and an enormous striped headdress of cloth that she seems to have designed herself. When she finally saw it she wrote that she doubted she had ever really been as beautiful as the painting made her. She was pleased anyway. This is the version of herself she wanted to survive, and it is the one that did.