Isabelle d'Este

Rubens painted this in his late twenties, while he was court artist to the Gonzaga family in Mantua. It is not his own invention but a copy, after a lost portrait by Titian of Isabella d'Este, the marchioness who had ruled Mantua's cultural life a century earlier. Isabella was one of the great collectors of the Renaissance, and vain about her image. When Titian painted the original she was around 60, but she had him show her as a young woman, and that is the face Rubens dutifully reproduces. Copying Titian this closely was how Rubens taught himself the Venetian handling of colour and flesh that he carried back north. The elaborate turban and gold-slashed sleeves come straight from Isabella's own sense of style.