Palma Vecchio

Venice in the early 1500s was the city of colour, where Giorgione and the young Titian were making painting glow, and among them worked a Bergamo-born artist we know as Palma Vecchio. The nickname means the elder, added later to keep him apart from his great-nephew, another painter called Palma the Younger.

Palma specialised in a particular kind of beauty, warm, full-figured women with cascades of reddish-gold hair, a colour so much his signature that art writers still call it Palma blonde. Sometimes they are saints gathered in a holy conversation, sometimes half-length beauties with no story at all, meant simply to be looked at.

He worked steadily rather than dramatically, and left a good deal unfinished when he died in 1528, still in his late forties. His will listed dozens of paintings in his workshop, many of them the same golden-haired women, waiting for buyers.