Portrait of a Lady

Alessandro Longhi painted this Venetian lady around 1770. He was the portraitist the city's patrician families turned to, the son of Pietro Longhi, whose small scenes of everyday Venetian life had made the family name. Alessandro took the grander commissions, recording the nobility and the members of the Venetian academy. Who the sitter was we no longer know. What survives is the work he was paid for, the careful lace at the sleeves, the sheen of silk, the composed and faintly distant expression of someone used to being looked at. Venice would lose its thousand-year independence to Napoleon in 1797, fewer than 30 years after he set this face down.