Сестра Тонэ

Kole Idromeno painted his sister Tone in 1883, in the northern city of Shkodra, when Albania was still a province of the Ottoman Empire and had no state of its own. He had trained in Venice, and he brought that European realism home to paint the woman in front of him plainly and directly, in the heavy traditional dress and jewellery of the region. Albanians later nicknamed the portrait their Mona Lisa. It became a touchstone partly because of its timing. In these decades a movement was pressing for an Albanian nation and language, and a serious, self-possessed local woman rendered with such care read as a quiet statement of who these people were. Tone gazes just past the viewer, unsmiling.