Donna al bagno

The painter of this small panel is unknown, and that is almost the point. Around 1500 he copied a picture by Jan van Eyck that has since vanished completely, so this modest version is one of the only records we have of what the great Flemish master painted. A nude woman stands at her bath, a maid in a red gown beside her, and on the shuttered window hangs a small convex mirror that catches both of them from behind, the same trick van Eyck used in his famous Arnolfini portrait now in London. Van Eyck died in 1441. Everything we can still see of this particular invention of his survives second-hand, in copies like this one made two generations later.