La Schiavona

Titian painted this around 1510, when he was barely into his twenties, and it does something that was still rare then: it treats a woman as a real, self-possessed individual. Private portraits of women hardly existed yet, and this sitter meets your eye with a level, commanding look you simply do not find in earlier European portraits of women. Her name is lost. The title, meaning the woman from Dalmatia, was pinned on much later, in the 17th century. On the stone ledge in front of her Titian carved, in paint, a profile portrait of the same face in relief, borrowing the idea from ancient Roman cameos, and slipped his initials there too. What began, perhaps, as a sample piece to attract commissions ended up as one of the first modern portraits of a woman as a person in her own right.