Portrait of Barbara Pallavicino

For a long time nobody was quite sure what they were looking at. This panel was once given to Piero della Francesca, and the young woman in it was thought to be Beatrice d'Este, the duchess of Milan. Both ideas turned out to be wrong. The painter was Alessandro Araldi, who worked in Parma around 1510, and the sitter is now identified as Barbara Pallavicino, from one of the region's old noble families. Araldi had absorbed a little of everything then moving through northern Italy, the clear light of Venetian portraiture and the crisp manner of Ferrara, and he sets her against a plain dark ground so that the gold thread of her dress and the rings on her fingers carry the picture. She wears her wealth quietly and looks slightly past us, the pose Renaissance sitters chose when they wanted to seem composed rather than caught.