Portrait of Isabella of Lorraine

Isabella of Lorraine died in 1453, and this portrait was painted around 1650, so the French artist who made it never saw her and worked from imagination and older images. She had been a striking figure in her day. Heiress to the duchy of Lorraine, she married Rene of Anjou, and when Rene was captured and held prisoner in a dynastic war, she governed his lands in his place and went south to press his claim to the throne of Naples, where she was crowned queen. By the 17th century she survived mainly as a name in the family trees of French royalty, which is what this picture serves: a gallery portrait of an illustrious ancestor, one of a long line of such imagined likenesses. Tellingly, she wears the fashions of the painter's own century rather than the 15th, the clearest sign that her real face had long since been forgotten.