Portrait d’une jeune femme en vierge sage

Sebastiano painted this in Venice around 1510, the year the plague carried off Giorgione, the young master whose soft, dreamy manner he had absorbed and whose unfinished pictures he was left to complete. You can feel that Venetian warmth in the light on the woman's face and shoulders. She is dressed up as one of the wise virgins from the Gospel parable, the ones who kept oil in their lamps and were ready when the bridegroom came, though she was plainly a real Venetian woman first. The same model turns up in other paintings he made about then, once holding the severed head of John the Baptist. Within a few years Sebastiano left for Rome and fell in with Michelangelo.