Portrait d'une Vénitienne, dite La Belle Nani

Veronese filled enormous canvases with feasts and crowds, but he almost never painted a single sitter. Only about six of his portraits of women are known, and this is the most admired of them. We do not actually know who she is. The name Nani comes from a Venetian family who owned the picture much later, and people assumed she must have been one of them. What her clothes tell us is plainer: the deep blue velvet, the gold-embroidered cuffs, the pearls and the ring on her hand mark her as a wealthy married woman of around 1560. Veronese gives the blue of that gown the same weight and glow he lavished on the robes of saints in his great church paintings.