Portrait of Settimia Jacovacci (?)

Around 1545 Titian was the most sought-after portraitist in Europe, about to travel to Rome to paint the aging Pope Paul III and his Farnese relatives. For a long time this veiled woman was counted among them and called a portrait of Vittoria Farnese, a daughter of that powerful house. That name has since been dropped. The museum in Budapest now labels her, still with a question mark, as Settimia Jacovacci, and even the attribution to Titian's own hand rather than his busy workshop is given with caution. What survives is the manner of about 1545, the dark quiet ground, the veil, the steady gaze he gave sitters of rank. The panel passed through the Munich Central Collecting Point in 1945, where the Allies gathered art displaced by the war, before it returned to Budapest, where it hangs today.