Portrait of a Girl as Flora

Around the turn of the 18th century, a French court woman often sat for her portrait dressed as a goddess. Loose drapery and a handful of flowers made you Flora, who brought the spring. A bow and a crescent moon made you Diana. The costume flattered, it tied the sitter to no particular year or gown, and it let a painter give twenty different women the same soft shoulders and the same borrowed divinity.

This girl was given Flora. The Pitti dates the picture only to about 1710 to 1730 and calls it attributed to Pierre Gobert, the portraitist who supplied that formula to Versailles and to the ducal court of Lorraine. Gobert worked fast and with assistants, so versions and studio repetitions carry his name across Europe, and the museum keeps the word attributed on this one.

The sitter has no name. The record calls her, for the moment, anonymous, and the inventory number it files her under belongs to the Uffizi's great stocktaking of 1890.