Female Martyr Saint

This panel is missing. It was stolen from the Galleria Borghese in 1978, and what remains is the museum's black-and-white photograph. It shows a young woman at half length, with a laurel wreath on her head and a halo around it. Her hand holds a small palm, the sign of a martyr, so she is known only as a martyr saint. That hand came to light in a restoration after 1950, when the panel was brought back to its original size. The Borghese inventory of 1693 listed the picture as the head of a saint by Leonardo da Vinci. In 1929 the scholar William Suida gave it to Cesare da Sesto, a painter from Leonardo's circle in Milan, working in the 1510s. Bernard Berenson preferred Andrea da Salerno, but most later writers returned to Cesare, and the gallery keeps his name as an attribution.