Portrait d'une jeune Vénitienne

Durer painted this during his second stay in Venice, around 1506. He was in his mid-thirties, already famous back home in Nuremberg for his prints, and had come south partly to be taken seriously as a painter among the Italians. You can see him studying the city in the sitter herself: the piled reddish-blond hair, the fashionable gown with sleeves laced over a white chemise, the pearls, all set against plain black so the colour and skin carry everything. Her name is lost. In dress and manner she reads as Venetian rather than German. The panel is small, barely larger than a sheet of paper, and painted on poplar, the wood Italian painters favoured, not the oak Durer would have reached for at home.