Young Woman in Green Dress

She holds a small box, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum reads it, with a question mark, as a jewellery box, an object that stood for a woman's beauty and adornment. Her dress has slipped slightly open. Palma painted her around 1512 to 1514, one of the half-length beauties that Venetian buyers wanted for their own rooms.

The panel's later travels are unusually well recorded. By 1636 it belonged to Bartolomeo della Nave, a Venetian merchant with one of the finest collections in the city. Two years later the English ambassador in Venice arranged for most of that collection to be bought for the Scottish nobleman James Hamilton, and the pictures were shipped to London. Hamilton fought for King Charles I, and in March 1649, a few weeks after the king, he too was executed. His paintings were sold off, and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, bought a large share of them. By 1659 this panel was listed in the archduke's collection, and it has stayed with the Habsburg pictures ever since.