Portrait of a Lady (with the attributes of the Saint Catherine of Alexandria)

Around 1475 Florence was full of women shown exactly like this, in strict profile against a window, the way you'd see a face on a coin or a medal. This young woman with the golden hair began as one of those portraits, a real person on a small panel. The wheel, the martyr's palm and the gold halo that turn her into Saint Catherine of Alexandria were painted in later, over the original, converting a private likeness into a holy image someone could pray to. For a long time she was thought to be a Botticelli, and the museum in Altenburg has kept his name on her since the late 1800s, though a cleaning in the 1980s showed how much of the old paint had been lost. The panel had a long journey before it reached Germany. It turns up in 1675 in the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici in Florence, and in 1847 Baron Bernhard von Lindenau bought it in Italy for the collection that still carries his name.