Donna con una mela

By about 1550 Titian was the most sought-after painter in Europe, working in Venice for popes and for the Emperor Charles V, and old enough to run a busy workshop turning out pictures like this one. She looks like a portrait, a fair-haired woman in a green jewelled robe, turned to gaze straight out at us, but she almost certainly was not one. Venetian painters had a steady market for images of anonymous beautiful women, and it is usually impossible to say whether such a face belonged to a real Venetian lady or was simply an ideal of beauty made for a collector's wall. The apple she holds nods to the old subjects those buyers liked, from Eve to the golden apple of Venus. Even the hand in the painting has been argued over. Scholars have gone back and forth on how much of it Titian did himself and how much fell to his workshop.