Portrait of a Young Woman

Nobody recorded who this young woman was, and the Rijksmuseum can only place the portrait somewhere between 1560 and 1578, the years Moroni spent painting the families of Bergamo, then a mainland city of the Venetian Republic. What she wanted remembered is on her body. She stands at half length with a fan in her left hand, heavy with jewellery, and a gold pendant hangs from a ribbon at her neck. The dress and the gems announce her family's standing, and Moroni paints them with the same even, unflattering attention he gives her face. The canvas came to Amsterdam in 1925, bought with help from the Vereniging Rembrandt, the private society founded in 1883 to keep and bring works of art into Dutch public collections.