Self-portrait

This is the only painting by Arcangela Paladini we can still point to, and she signed it a year before she died. The Latin line on the canvas says she painted it with her own hand in 1621, at the command of Maria Maddalena of Austria, the grand duchess of Tuscany who had taken her up. Paladini was barely into her twenties and already known at the Medici court for several things at once. She painted, she sang in the Pitti and in the church of Santa Felicita, she wrote verse, and she embroidered so well that people called her the needleworker. She looks out here in a dark dress and a string of pearls. She died in 1622, around 23 years old, and this face is nearly all that is left of her.