Portrait of a Woman, called "The Nun"

For most of the 19th century people called this woman a nun, and she was nothing of the kind. The veil over her hair and the plain dark dress were ordinary Florentine fashion around 1510, but they were enough to fool later viewers, and a Roman dealer named Felice Cartoni seems to have christened her La Monaca, the nun, to help sell the panel in 1819. He was selling it as a Leonardo. That hope held for a long time, until the dry, careful handling of the face argued otherwise, and the name drifted through Perugino, Piero di Cosimo and others before scholars settled on Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio. Behind the story sits a plain thing to look at: a young woman in a shadowed loggia, a small open book in her hands and a gold ring turned to the light, with the towers of Florence showing through the openings behind her.