Portrait of a Woman

This woman has a partner. The Museum of Fine Arts bought her in 1917 together with a portrait of a man on a panel of the same size, about 41 by 31 centimetres, the two sold as a pair for 10,000 dollars by the New York dealers Kleinberger. They were said to have come from a private collection in Taranto, in the far south of Italy, and by 1911 they belonged jointly to two dealers, Ercole Canessa in Paris and Colnaghi in London. The man wears a red tunic buttoned to the throat and a black cap. She has her hair dressed in a coil with a fringe over the forehead, a low-cut bodice and sleeves of reddish-brown brocade. The name of Vittore Carpaccio was attached to the pair in 1913 by the Finnish-born art historian Tancred Borenius, writing in the Burlington Magazine, and most scholars have accepted it. Bernard Berenson did not. In his lists of 1957 he gave both panels to a close follower of Carpaccio, and the museum's label still hedges, attributed to. It dates her to somewhere between about 1500 and 1520.