Portrait of Laura Dianti

Titian painted this in the early 1520s for the court of Ferrara. The woman is Laura Dianti, the mistress and later wife of Duke Alfonso I d'Este, shown in a rich blue dress with a diadem and jewellery, her hand resting on the shoulder of a young African page who looks up at her. Art historians often point to it as the first European portrait to place a sitter of high rank beside a Black attendant, a motif that would be copied in grand portraiture for the next two centuries. The picture later carried a weight its maker never intended. After the duke's death it was used as evidence in a dispute over whether he and Laura had truly been married.