Clarissa Strozzi (1540-1581) at the Age of Two

As indicated by the inscription on the plaque that is depicted on the wall on the upper left, this picture of the two-year-old Clarissa Strozzi was executed in Venice in the year 1542. It is one of the few portraits of children in Titian’s oeuvre, and – together with Bronzino’s roughly contemporary portraits of the Medici children – one of the earliest autonomous children’s portraits in Italian painting.
Clarissa Strozzi (1540–81) was the eldest daughter of Roberto Strozzi and Magdalena de’ Medici, both natives of Florence, and presumably received her name from her grandmother Clarissa de’ Medici. She was born in Venice, where her parents lived in exile from 1536 until 1542. In a letter addressed to the painter and dated July 6, 1542, the writer Pietro Aretino, who was a friend of Titian’s, expresses admiration for the beauty and truth to nature of the recently completed portrait.
The little girl stands at a stone table whose base displays antique-style marble reliefs of dancing putti, feeding her little dog with a pretzel. She wears a long silk dress; hanging from her belt from a chain that reaches almost all the way down to her feet is a fragrance box, a so-called apple of amber. A window opens on the upper right, above the stone table, offering a view onto a distant park landscape where a pair of swans glides along the water’s surface. Evidently, Titian subsequently painted over a mountain range that appeared above the horizon, adding the blue sky. While the brightest values are concentrated at the centre of the picture, in the figure of the child, in the flesh tones and the silken garment, the wine-red draperies that hang down from the right at the edge of the stone table represent the strongest colour accent, forming a restrained chromatic triad on the right-hand side of the picture together with the dark green of the landscape and the blue of the sky. In contrast, the left-hand side of the picture is devoid of colouristic accents, and lies for the most part in a darkness that is interrupted only by the plaque with inscription on the upper left, which forms a counterweight to the relief of the putti on the lower right. The figure of the girl, her pose oriented along the vertical central axis, her gaze gliding past that of the beholder and into the distance, radiates cool self-confidence. Marking the transverse axis is the lower edge of the window opening and the stone tabletop. Within the axial system of coordinates, the child’s seemingly casual, playful attitude acquires a certain steadfastedness and dignity.
In the same year the present picture was completed, the Strozzi family was obliged to leave the Republic of Venice, which had become uncomfortable by virtue of their close relations to the French court. At the latest in 1544, they took up residence in Rome, where Clarissa married Cristofano Savelli in 1557. After her death, the picture remained in the family’s Roman palace. In 1641, it was shown at one of the annual art exhibitions held in the vestibule of San Giovanni Decollato. In 1770, it was engraved by Domenico Cunego. In the early 19th century, it was transferred from Rome to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where Wilhelm Bode purchased it in 1878 for the Berlin gallery. Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019