Портрет дамы

Around 1475 in Florence, fashionable young women were painted the way emperors appeared on ancient Roman coins: strictly in profile, cool and unreachable, never meeting your eye. This is one of them, a blonde girl set sharp against a pale blue sky, her hair braided and pinned with pearls. You are meant to read her wealth and standing off her clothes, a deep red velvet overgown trimmed with gold, and beneath it a sleeve embroidered with a pomegranate, a motif that was both the height of fashion and an old emblem of fertility. Painters rarely recorded such sitters' names, and hers is lost. It belongs to a small family of near-identical profile portraits, with sisters now scattered between Milan, Berlin, Boston and New York.