Bust of Isotta Brembati

This is believed to be the earliest of Moroni’s independent portraits of women, which number about fifteen of the nearly one hundred twenty-five portraits attributed to him today. Identified in the nineteenth century as the Bergamasque noblewoman and poet Isotta Brembati, the sitter was painted again by Moroni at a later date in the full-length seated portrait; she may have been the conduit for Moroni’s painting of several other members of her family in the 1550s and 1560s. Possibly depicting Isotta at sixteen years of age, this portrait may have been commissioned as a gift for her future husband, Lelio Secco d’Aragona di Calcio, who left her widowed some time before 1561, when she married Gian Gerolamo Grumelli, the subject of Moroni’s Man in Pink.