Portrait of a Woman

This young woman was painted in oil on a sheet of parchment, later laid down on canvas, and for nearly a century nobody agreed on who had painted her. In 1833, when the Borghese bound their collection with a legal entail so that nothing could be sold off, she was listed as Venetian school. In 1891, on the word of the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, she became a work by the Bolognese painter Lorenzo Sabatini. In 1924 the scholar Carlo Gamba compared her with a portrait in the Prado and gave her to Niccolò dell'Abbate, and later critics followed him.

Her hair is gathered in a fine golden net, a pearl drop hangs from her ear, and a fur is slung over one shoulder. At her neckline sits a small posy that the museum reads as jasmine, a flower of chastity.