Livia Balbi took refuge in Titian's home when she separated from her husband.
The seriously rich indulged themselves just as hedge-fund managers do today shopping and seeking out promising young painters, such as Titian.
In Rome, the most anticipated art exhibition of the year, Tiziano (Titian), has been unveiled at the Scuderie del Quirinale.
The question is important, as much for dating the picture as for gaining a better idea of Titian's complex domestic arrangements.
Titian scholars agree that this is the master's work, but Christie's is nervous of its unfinished state, its sitters and its date.
Titian was famed for painting directly on to the canvas from life and very few drawings or oil sketches by him remain.
With abject competitive fury, he was not above imitating the grand dragon of the Venice art world, Titian, and his designated successor, Veronese.
Professor Anderson cites a recent book on late Titian by Lionello Puppi, an Italian art historian, that indicates Pomponio was cruel to his other siblings.
As court painter (and ultimately curator of the royal collections), he knew that no new painter could outshine the royal masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens.
Titian, meanwhile, also gave Lavinia a big enough dowry to marry a gentleman farmer and his other portraits of her show her in more lavish dress.
Charles Hope, director of the Warburg Institute, thinks the lady could be either Titian's legitimate daughter Lavinia, his natural daughter Emilia, or possibly his cousin Livia Balbi.
David Jaffe regards it as inferior, and he did not hang it in the magnificent Titian show he curated at the National Gallery in London in 2003.
The 77 entries in the catalogue for a big Titian show in 1990, for example, were written by 36 different authors, guaranteeing that no coherent view would emerge.
Titian, who came from a peasant community high in the Dolomites close to the Austrian border where the living was always tight, was acutely conscious of his finances.
Although no scholars have commented on this, the girl, with her dark curls, piercing gaze and long nose bears more of a resemblance to Titian than to her mother.
This might also explain the lady's modest adornments and the more expensive jewels of her daughter, who this portrait would help to legitimise as a member of the Titian household.
Titian wanted his eldest, Pomponio, to become a priest, and he spent years trying to persuade his patrons to give the boy benefices that would enable him to live in comfort.
Titian trusted his judgment and enjoyed his vivid conversation.
There are indeed records of a framed portrait of Livia being returned to her husband after Titian's death, but as this painting is unfinished, it is unlikely that it would have been framed.
Though there is sometimes rather more background than is entirely necessary to illuminate Titian in the foreground, a sense of history differentiates this biography from academic studies, and is one of its strengths.
It will be shown alongside Titian's two other known versions of John the Baptist, loaned from the Accademia gallery in Venice and the monastery at the former royal palace of El Escorial, near Madrid.
The two Titian paintings form part of the Duke of Sutherland's Bridgewater Collection - featuring works by Raphael, Rembrandt and Poussin - which has been on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland since 1945.
The energy which ought to go into the Titian study is eventually devoted to an entirely different project, absurd in its solemnity: to give up watching the television, which in the process almost becomes human.
In 2007, the museum undertook an extensive examination of the painting, previously attributed to "an anonymous Madrid School artist of the 17th Century", and came to the conclusion that it was an original work by Titian.
For Berenson, looking at a picture was always an emotional experience, a new discovery and only then to be placed in the continuum of Italian Renaissance painting from Duccio, Masaccio and Giotto through Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Professor Anderson thinks the lady could be Titian's mistress possibly his daughter Emilia's mother, who was a servant in his home in the 1550s (his wife Cecilia died in 1530) and that the painting is from the mid- to late-1550s.
Tintoretto (1518-94) is the most mercurial of the five undisputed immortals of Venetian painting the others being Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese and I was eager to see the Prado show, because I have never managed to get a satisfying fix on him.
However, some experts remain sceptical: "The key thing is that the pose in the newly discovered version can now be linked back to an original concept by Titian, " Bendor Grosvenord, co-director of the Philip Mould gallery in London told The Art Newspaper.
The newly attributed work, found in the parish church of Nuestra Senora del Carmen in Cantoria, Southern Spain, first came to the attention of art expert Miguel Falomir - curator of the current exhibition - while he was researching a catalogue to accompany the Prado's 2003 Titian exhibition.
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