Retrato de Cristina de Dinamarca

For a long time this severe woman in black was thought to be a Titian. Scholarship has since moved the portrait to the younger Venetian Jacopo Tintoretto, though it still carries the weight of that older name. It shows Christina of Denmark, a Danish king's daughter who became Duchess of Milan and then of Lorraine, and who as a teenage widow was once floated as a bride for Henry VIII of England. By about 1556, when this was painted, that match was long past and she was widowed again, running a small court of her own. The picture belonged that same year to Mary of Hungary, the Habsburg regent who governed the Netherlands for her brother the emperor, and it hung in her collection long before its journey to Belgrade.