女子肖像

A young woman sits in dark and white clothes that read as mourning, in the shade of a laurel. Correggio filled the picture with clues and then left the puzzle open. In her hand is a bowl inscribed in Greek with the word for nepenthe, the drink of forgetting in Homer that dissolves grief. The laurel behind her is the plant of poets, so many have thought she is Veronica Gambara, a poetess and Correggio's patron, or else a widow named Ginevra Rangone who lost her husband around 1517. The ivy climbing the tree trunk stands for enduring love. It is the only painting by Correggio in the whole Hermitage, and one of very few portraits he made at all, since he spent most of his short career on altarpieces and ceilings rather than on faces.