Portrait of a Female Painter

Somebody once edited this panel. An inscription ran across it, LAVINIA FONTANA DE ZAPPIS FACIEBAT MDLXXIX, and the woman held a palette and brushes, so the picture was read for a long time as a self-portrait by Lavinia Fontana, the Bolognese painter who ran a working shop of her own. Restoration in the Palatina found that all three, the lettering, the palette and the brushes, had been put in much later by another hand. The added date does not fit the panel either. It says 1579, while the museum places the painting around 1560 to 1570 and gives it to a painter formed in the manner of Anthonis Mor, the Netherlandish portraitist who worked for the Habsburg courts. Who she was has not been settled. She wears an embroidered dress pulled in at the waist, and pearls.