Bartolomeo Veneto

Bartolomeo Veneto worked in the first decades of the 1500s, and he signed himself as half Venetian and half Cremonese, from Lombardy in northern Italy. He trained in Venice under Gentile Bellini, from the family that shaped Venetian painting, then moved between Venice, the mainland, and the court of Ferrara, a duchy in north-central Italy ruled by the Este family.

He is best known now for cool, precise portraits of women, several of them long attached to a famous name. One version, a stern-faced noblewoman, has been called Lucrezia Borgia, the Este duchess whose family reputation for poison and intrigue still clings to her. Another, a young woman crowned with flowers and holding a nosegay in the guise of Flora, the Roman goddess of spring, was also once taken for Borgia. Scholars now doubt both names: the sitters are most likely unidentified, dressed in ideal or allegorical costume for patrons who wanted beauty rather than a likeness.

The Flora hangs in the Städel museum in Frankfurt, its every petal and curl painted with the hard, jewel-bright finish that was his signature.