Portrait of a Young Woman

Florence in the 1480s had a favourite face. Simonetta Vespucci, admired as the city's great beauty, had died young in 1476, and painters kept returning to her features long after, half portrait and half ideal. Many scholars think this profile is one of those returns, made around a decade after her death rather than from a living sitter. The woman wears almost no jewellery, her hair bound close, her gaze slipping past you to something outside the frame. Whoever she was, she is set in strict profile, the format Florentines borrowed from ancient coins to lend a face the permanence of a medal.