안테아

We call her Antea, but nobody actually knows who she was. Parmigianino painted this young woman around 1535, in the last years of a short life, and left no record of who she is or why the portrait was made. The name came more than a century later, in 1671, when a writer decided she must be a celebrated Roman courtesan praised in the poems of Pietro Aretino. That was guesswork, and it stuck. She may be a real sitter, or an invented ideal of beauty, a type painters of the age liked to conjure. What is real is the show of wealth: the shimmering yellow silk, the white embroidered apron, and the marten fur slung over one shoulder, its little gold-mounted head resting against her arm.