Venus with a Mirror

Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555) is a painting by Titian, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and it is considered to be one of the collection's highlights.

In 1581, five years after Titian's death, the contents of his house in Venice, including the Venus with a Mirror, were sold by his son and heir Pomponio Vechellio to Christoforo Barbarigo.

In 1850 the Russian Consul-General in Venice, A. Kvostov, purchased the painting, along with a large number of other masterpieces, from the Barbarigo family, for Czar Nicholas I for the sum of 525,000 francs, and it entered the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

[5] In 1931, in order to earn foreign currency for the first of the five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet government secretly sold the painting, along with a number of other masterpieces, to a syndicate of art dealers, who sold it to the American collector Andrew Mellon, who wished to create a national art museum for the United States.

[5] The pose of the painting may have been influenced by Ancient Greek and Roman statues of Venus Titian could have seen in Rome and Florence.

Woman with a Mirror , by Giovanni Bellini (1515). Titian had worked as a pupil in the studio of Bellini, and adopted Bellini's rich and sensuous colors.
Palma il Giovane ?