Portrait of a Courtesan

The woman here was real and named: Fillide Melandroni, a Roman courtesan Caravaggio knew and used as a model more than once in the late 1590s. He painted her holding a small spray of flowers, and scholars still argue whether they are jasmine, for erotic love, or orange blossom, for marriage. There is a harder fact behind the picture. What survives of it is only a photograph. The canvas hung in Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum until the last months of the Second World War, when it was moved for safekeeping into a flak tower at Friedrichshain. In May 1945 that tower burned, and around 400 paintings stored inside went with it. This is one of them, known now the way we know a face from an old passport photo.