Portrait of a young girl

This portrait has a near-twin. In the Accademia's inventory it sits at number 841, right after the young woman with the sheet of music at 840, and the two came into the museum together in 1922 and still hang in the same room. Both are dated 1797, and both show a young sitter in the plain, high-waisted fashion that was coming in as powdered elegance went out. Here the girl is younger, turned softly toward us against a quiet background, with none of the classical props a grander portrait would carry. Matteini painted this kind of gentle, Arcadian likeness for private families rather than for public display, which is why so little is recorded about who she was.