Portrait of a Lady (Cassandra Fedele?)

In Venice around 1500, what a lady wore in public was a matter for the law. The Republic's dress rules said a necklace had to sit around the neck and no lower. Pearls, linked with the Virgin Mary's chastity, were forbidden to courtesans and to women outside the nobility. So the jewellery on this small panel reads almost like a document. A choker of large pearls sits at the sitter's throat, with loops of heavy silver chain below it. In Vittore Carpaccio's Two Venetian Ladies, now in the Museo Correr, the same two kinds of necklace are shared between two women who were long taken for courtesans, until their jewels showed them to be respectable wives. Here, in a portrait attributed to Carpaccio and dated to about 1499 or 1500, a single young woman wears both.