Retrato de una joven

Around 1490 Domenico Ghirlandaio ran the busiest painting workshop in Florence, busy enough that a teenager named Michelangelo was sent there to train. This is a portrait of a young woman whose name is lost. She turns her head three-quarters toward us against a plain dark ground, in the manner Florentine painters used just before they began opening portraits onto landscape. She wears the close-fitted dress of the moment and a coral necklace at the throat. Her face resembles the women Ghirlandaio had recently frescoed for the banker Francesco Sassetti in the church of Santa Trinita, so she may belong to that wealthy circle. The coral was not only ornament; people of the day believed it warded off harm.