A mysterious young woman has come from abroad and taken up residence in Pasadena, Calif. She wears a white satin dress, pearls and a ruby ring and has a slight smile — and nobody knows who she is.
In letters, the Venetian Renaissance master Titian referred to the elegant woman as his "most precious being" and the "mistress of my soul." But he never named the subject of his 1561 painting Portrait of a Lady in White.
The artwork is on loan from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. Carol Togneri, senior curator at the Norton Simon museum, where the painting is on view until the end of March, walks us through a few theories about who this captivating woman might have been.
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