Joven con vestido negro

In Venice around 1520 there was a lively taste for pictures of beautiful women who were nobody in particular, painted to be admired rather than to record a real sitter. Titian made several, and this is one of them. The young woman turns slightly toward us in a black dress open over a white shift, her fair hair the Venetian ideal of the day. For centuries no one thought it was his. The painting was filed under Palma Vecchio, then Giovanni Cariani, until the scholar Roberto Longhi recognised Titian's hand in the last century and the attribution stuck. She belongs to a family of such blondes he painted again and again, among them the Flora and the Woman with a Mirror.