Portrait of Isabella d'Este (or Isabella in Black) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Italian painter Titian, completed between 1534 and 1536. It shows the Marquess of Mantua, Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), daughter of Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, and Eleanor of Naples with an ermine zibellino draped over her shoulder.
Although Titian depicts her as a young woman, she was around 62 at the time Isabella was socially ambitious and aware of the effect a painting by a renowned artists might have on her reputation and prestige - she also commissioned portraits by Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea Mantegna.
It is one of two portraits Titian painted of her; Isabella in Red (or Aged Isabella) of 1529 is known only through a Peter Paul Rubens copy. It showed a more aged and matronly Isabella, but she was so displeased with the picture that she asked for a second idealised portrait, showing how she thought she looked forty years earlier. Art historian Lionel Cust mentions that Isabella's fame and renown was not due to "beauty, but to intellect and character". Fred Kleiner wrote that the work is a "distinctive portrayal of his poised and self-assured patron that owes little to its model". It is today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Isabella was portrayed a number times in her youth. She was betrothed to Francesco Gonzaga in 1480 when she was 6; they married when she was 16. She was painted by Cosme Tura as a child and on a number of occasions around the time of her wedding, a period during which she was honoured by the striking of a commemorative medal. She was critical of a portrait by Andrea Mantegna completed after 1493, and by the 1510s became very weary of representations of her likeness. She seems to have feared the effects of age, and a short woman, worried she was getting stout.
She retained very strong ideas for the rest of her life as to how she should be portrayed. From the 1520s she asked that she be painted from written descriptions - with the rationale that words captured more closely a person's essence than life sittings. This was convenient for Titian, who was much sought after as a portraitist, disliked travel, and anyway prided himself on the fact that he could capture a likeness from written description. Nonetheless, she rejected his first portrait, the now lost Isabella in red of 1529, feeling it did not flatter, and five years later asked that he paint a second. The complaints registered of the first painting indicate that the last thing sought by the patron was anything approaching a likeness. There was displeasure with the portrayal of her nose, posture, costume, facial expression, and the highlighting of her squint.
Isabella sought to influence Titian by sending him a 1511 portrait painted by Francesco Francia, which shows her as a young woman and highlighted her girlish beauty. This work was in turn based on an even earlier portrait (probably Lorenzo Costa or Leonardo's drawing) and her half-sister Lucrezia d'Este-Bentivoglio's oral description. Francia was given the opportunity to travel to Mantua so that Isabella could sit, but he declined, believing that he would paint better from the drawing and written description. This was convenient for Isabella, who wrote to him that he had "indeed made us far more beautiful by your art than nature ever made us". Yet she had later doubts that this work was how she was to be definitely seen and remembered by; she believed it made her eyes look "too black" and that the shadows were too heavy, and asked that both be lightened.
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