Bildnis eines jungen Mädchens

Petrus Christus painted this small panel in Bruges around 1470, and one thing about it would have startled anyone who saw it then. The girl is not lost in prayer or gazing off to the side, as sitters almost always were. She looks straight out and meets your eye, calm and a little wary, and that direct address was close to unheard of, even in Italy. She sits in a real corner of a room, against a panelled wall, in an actual pocket of space rather than the flat gold or blank dark of older portraits. Who she was is still a guess. An inscription on the lost original frame hinted she belonged to the English Talbot family, in Bruges in those years for the wedding of a Burgundian duke. That tight jewelled band across her forehead pulls at the skin around her eyes, a small awkward detail he chose not to smooth away.