(赤い)ベレー帽の若い女性の肖像

Durer painted this small panel in 1507, the year he came home to Nuremberg from his second long stay in Venice. Italy had changed how he saw things. The soft rounded modelling of the girl's face, the warm light on her skin, the frank simplicity of the pose all owe more to Venetian painters like Giovanni Bellini, whom Durer had met and admired, than to the sharp linear style of his German training. She wears a red beret tipped over curling fair hair, a jewel on a fine chain hanging from it, and looks out steadily with large pale eyes. Who she was, we no longer know. The panel, barely 30 centimetres tall, hangs today in the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin.