Portrait of Isotta Brembati - Giovanni Battista Moroni

Moroni's full-length portrait of the Bergamo noblewoman and writer Isotta Brembati, seated in a gown of green and gold brocade.

Giovanni Battista Moroni (about 1520–1579) painted the leading families of Bergamo for most of his career. This full-length portrait shows Isotta Brembati (about 1534–1586), the daughter of a noble Bergamo family. Palazzo Moroni in Bergamo, where the painting hangs, dates it to about 1554–1557 and suggests it was made for her first marriage, to Lelio Secco d'Aragona.

She sits in an X-frame chair with red cushions, between two marble half-columns, and looks straight out at the viewer. Her gown is green brocade worked with gold foliage, and a fur piece with a gold animal head lies across her shoulders. Pearls circle her neck and a cross hangs on her breast. Jewels and a pink bow are set in her hair. In her lap she holds a soft bundle of pink and white feathers.

Full-length portraits of seated women were unusual at the time. Moroni treats the official occasion with his usual attention to fact. The flushed complexion, the pronounced nose, the full lips and the strong chin point to a likeness taken from life rather than an idealised type. The brocade pattern is laid out with care across the whole lower half of the canvas.

Isotta Brembati was a writer as well as a noblewoman. She wrote in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish and led a literary circle. In Milan her Latin orations impressed the Senate. After her first husband died she married her brother-in-law, Gian Gerolamo Grumelli, in 1561. He is the subject of Moroni's Knight in Pink, and in the nineteenth century this canvas was enlarged so that it could hang as a pair with his portrait.

The painting is in oil on canvas and measures 160 × 115 cm. It belongs to a private Moroni family collection entrusted to FAI, and hangs at Palazzo Moroni in Bergamo.