Woman Playing a Lute

This small panel of 1520 became a pattern. Lombard workshops copied it more than twenty times over the following decades, and versions of the lute player turn up today in the Ambrosiana in Milan, the Castello Sforzesco, the Getty in California, a seminary collection in Rovigo. What made it so useful is that it could be pointed either way. Leave the young woman as she is and she is a musician, a secular half-length for a private house. Add a halo and she becomes Saint Cecilia, patron of music, or Saint Catherine, and the same picture can hang in a chapel. Bartolomeo Veneto painted the version at Brera with the hard, enamelled finish he was known for. It came here in 1931 from the Milanese collection of Count Cesare Del Majno.