Attributed to Cesare da Sesto

The Borghese inventory of 1693 listed this small panel as a Leonardo. It shows a young woman in half-length, crowned with laurel and holding a little palm, the sign of a martyr, and the hand with the palm only reappeared during a restoration in the early 1950s. After Leonardo the panel was given to Zuccari and then to a vague Florentine school, until the German scholar William Suida proposed Cesare da Sesto in 1929. The museum keeps his name with attributed to, its signal for a considered judgement that no document confirms.

Cesare da Sesto came from Sesto Calende on Lake Maggiore and belonged to the Leonardeschi, the Milanese painters who worked in Leonardo's orbit. He also spent years in Rome and in southern Italy, where the example of Raphael changed his style, and he died in Milan in 1523. Bernard Berenson, the American connoisseur, preferred Andrea da Salerno in 1936, and later Borghese scholars returned to Suida's proposal. The panel has been in the Borghese collection since at least 1693 and passed to the Italian State in 1902.