Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile

The Kunsthistorisches Museum makes a surprising point with this young woman. Palma idealised fashionable beauty so thoroughly that his women, sacred or secular, begin to look like sisters, and this panel is the museum's own example. The same face, turned toward us over her shoulder, appears again in this gallery, as one of the full-length female saints in his large Mary with Child and Saints.

In Venice in the early 1520s a face could move easily between those two worlds. The same features could serve a devotional painting of saints around the Virgin and a private picture of a beautiful woman, meant for a collector's room. What mattered was the ideal, not the identity of a sitter. This panel is dated to about 1520 to 1525, the last years of Palma's life, and it entered the Habsburg collection in 1649.