Portrait of a Lady Wearing a Balzo

The headdress is the point of the picture. It is called a balzo, a padded ring worn like a soft turban, set back off the forehead and wrapped in fabric threaded with the sitter's own hair. In the early decades of the 16th century this was the height of fashion for well-born women in northern Italy, a look often credited to Isabella d'Este, who was writing about hers around 1509. The canvas came to the Accademia from the Contarini, one of the old Venetian families, and we do not know the sitter's name. Licinio painted many such women in the manner of Titian and Palma il Vecchio, and here he records the fashion down to one telling detail: Venetian women bleached their hair pale to match the look, and you can still make out the faint darker line where her natural colour was growing back.