Lady revealing her Breast

The Prado dates this between 1580 and 1590, and the skin is the part worth knowing about. Domenico Tintoretto built it from lead white tinted with vermilion, with the veins drawn in ground lapis. Venetian women put the same lead white on their faces as make-up. It gave them exactly this alabaster surface, and it thinned their hair, aged the skin underneath and could poison them outright.

An X-ray shows the sitter was first painted looking out at us. The painter turned her into strict profile, the way patrician women appear on antique medals, and the pearls wound through the hair stayed.

Who she is has never been settled. Pictures like this one, half-length Venetian beauties baring a breast, have traditionally been called courtesans, and brides, wives, biblical heroines and saints have all been proposed instead. A writer on gesture, Giovanni Bonifacio, explained in 1616 that uncovering the breast could mean display and also the keeping of a lover's feelings, which leaves the gesture where the painter left it.