Portrait of a Lady in a Turban

Francesco Torbido's Portrait of a Lady in a Turban, painted around 1517 and now at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, is a work by a Veronese painter who trained under Giorgione and later became a principal collaborator of Giulio Romano in Verona. The turban, an exotic headwear associated with the Ottoman East, appears in Venetian and north Italian portraits of this period as a fashionable or theatrical element, often giving female subjects an air of Orientalist fantasy. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum holds an exceptional collection of Italian Renaissance art assembled with remarkable connoisseurship by its founder in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The portrait shows Giorgionesque influence in its atmospheric flesh modeling and the soft transitions between light and shadow. The turban creates an unusual compositional element that draws the eye upward and lends the sitter an exotic, slightly mysterious character.