What These Unnamed Women Wore Tells Us Who They Were

Feature image: Bartholomeus van der Helst, Portrait of a Lady in Black Satin with a Fan (detail), 1644, © The National Gallery, London via The National Gallery

For most of European art history, a portrait commission was an expensive record of a family's standing, and the names attached to it were meant to last. Over centuries of sales, inheritances, and relabeling, many of those names fell away. Sitters lost their identities, painters lost their attributions, and museum catalogs inherited titles as plain as Portrait of a Lady.

When the paperwork disappears, curators turn to the painting itself, and the sitter's clothing is often the most reliable evidence. A hairline, the cut of a bodice, the trim on a sleeve, or the weight of a gold chain can fix a portrait within a decade and suggest a woman's rank, her region, and sometimes her marriage. The National Gallery in London holds a group of these anonymous women, painted between about 1465 and the mid-nineteenth century, and nearly everything we know about each portrait comes from what the sitter chose to wear.

The earliest woman in the group appears in Alesso Baldovinetti's Portrait of a Lady, painted in Florence around 1465. Golden hair, rosy lips, and pale skin made up the city's ideal of feminine beauty, and Baldovinetti gave her all three. He set her in strict profile, the standard format for a Florentine portrait until about 1470, borrowed from the emperors on Roman coins and medals and read as a mark of noble rank. Around her long neck hangs a strand of orange beads with a pendant holding a large pearl, and a cluster of pearls crowns her elaborate hairstyle. Baldovinetti picked out each jewel with tiny white dots, a habit so characteristic of his technique that the same dots trace the edges of her nose, chin, and sleeve.

The National Gallery reads this as a marriage portrait, and the clothes support that argument. In fifteenth-century Florence, the groom's family dressed the bride, ordering the finest fabrics and jewels they could afford, and a portrait recorded that outlay as much as the young woman wearing it. Pearls stood for purity, the virtue a bride was expected to bring to the match. The profile also gives her puffed sleeve equal billing with her face, and on it sits an embroidered emblem of three palm leaves bound by a ribbon and framed by two gold-veined feathers. Curators believe it was her husband's coat of arms, though the family it belonged to remains unidentified, so the emblem names a household history has since misplaced.

By 1490, the Florentine portrait had turned to face its audience. Domenico Ghirlandaio, who, according to Giorgio Vasari, trained under Baldovinetti, ran one of the city's busiest workshops, staffed by his brothers Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio and his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi. A member of that workshop painted the Portrait of a Girl now in London, and the three-quarter view brings the sitter round to meet the viewer, closer to an encounter than the distant, coin-like profile of a generation earlier. Painters of the period often idealized female sitters, yet the National Gallery still finds an individual in her small, prominent chin, the kind of detail that let a portrait stand in for a whole person after death.

Her hair supplies the date. The style was fashionable in Florence around 1490, and both her hairstyle and her clothing closely match a portrait of Selvaggia Sassetti attributed to Davide Ghirlandaio, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her sleeves carry a history of their own. When the Gallery bought the panel at the James Whatman sale in 1887, conservators later removed the painted-over sleeves to recover their original deep green. A portrait built on clothing evidence can shift with every cleaning, and here a single restoration returned a color the sitter actually wore.

Two portraits in the collection share the same catalog label, Italian, Venetian, and the same title, Portrait of a Lady. The first, dated about 1510 to 1520, is dated entirely by its costume. The sitter wears a pink damask gown with embroidered bands and a row of pearls stitched along the bodice, and the band across her chest carries a hunting scene of dogs chasing a deer and a hare. The painter drew fine lines into the background of that band to suggest individual threads of gold embroidery, then painted every link of her long gold chain. The downturned corners of her mouth give her a mournful expression, and a painted frame across the top of the panel follows a Northern European convention, leading the Gallery to suggest a German or Netherlandish artist working in Venice.

The second Venetian portrait, from about 1515 to 1520, places a richly dressed woman behind a parapet against a plain dark ground, her hand resting on the ledge as though she sits at an open window. Venetian painters often used the parapet in bust-length and three-quarter-length portraiture because it pushed the sitter back into the picture and disguised where the body was cropped. She turns to look to her right, perhaps toward a matching portrait of a husband that has since been separated from her. The Gallery also suggests she may be an ideal beauty rather than a specific woman, a portrait type especially popular in Venice through the work of Palma Vecchio.

Corneille de Lyon, active in France from 1533 until he died in 1575, built a career on small, precise portrait panels, and his success drew followers who worked in his manner. One of them painted the Portrait of a Woman now in London, which the Gallery dates to about 1560 from the fashion of her clothes. She wears a pale yellow cap patterned with orange dots and dashes, a shorthand for gold embroidery on white fabric, along with a purple dress with deeper purple facings and white sleeves cut with slashes. A necklace of small pearls alternating with gold links loops into her neckline. The Gallery judges the jewelry and dress well made but modest, the wardrobe of a woman below court rank.

A close relative of this portrait hangs at Eaton Hall in the Duke of Westminster's collection. That sitter wears a dark veil associated with women of lesser rank and loops her necklace into her neckline in the same way, and she shares the same smile, the same wide-set eyes, and the same awkward placement of the near eye. Curators suggest both panels came from one follower of Corneille, perhaps tracing his underdrawing from a design by a more skilled hand. If that painter worked in Corneille's own workshop, he may have been assigned to less prosperous clients.

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) served as court painter to Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Florence and later Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his polished, cool portraits of Medici women set the standard for Florentine court dress. The Portrait of a Lady, cataloged under Follower of Bronzino, dates from a few years after his death. Her costume places her among Florentine noblewomen of the late 1570s and 1580s, and the Gallery dates the panel to probably 1575 to 1585 on that basis alone. The style also recalls Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), Bronzino's pupil, who painted court portraits for Cosimo's son, Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici.

The Gallery raises a more unsettling possibility for this sitter. She may be an invention, a composite assembled from several of Bronzino's portraits of Medici ladies. Her costume matches the opulence of the Medici court, and the Gallery leaves the question of a real sitter open so that this portrait may record a court wardrobe more faithfully than any single woman.

The latest portrait in the group is attributed to an unidentified French painter, and the National Gallery catalogs it as Portrait of a Lady, about 1830. Curators make a careful case for a later date, built almost entirely on her hair and dress. The hairstyle leaves her ear uncovered, a look that only became fashionable in the late 1840s. Before then, a bourgeois or aristocratic woman almost always sat for a portrait in a cap or with some ornament in her hair, and even in 1856, the glimpse of an ear in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Madame Moitessier still read as bold.

The dress narrows the window further. Her long bodice is typical of the 1840s, and by the mid-1850s bodices had shortened again. The neckline is too low for daywear, so the Gallery reads it as an evening dress, one already somewhat behind the fashion when she wore it for this portrait. Dress and wrap are both plain, set against a bare green background, and a simple cameo earring is her only visible jewelry. From these details, the Gallery proposes a provincial, middle-class Frenchwoman painted sometime after 1850, two decades later than the label date.

One portrait in the group carries a name beyond doubt, and it belongs to the painter. In 1551, Catharina van Hemessen signed her Portrait of a Woman in Latin in the upper right corner, CATHARINA DE/HEMESSEN PINGEBAT/1551, meaning Catharina de Hemessen was painting this, 1551. She was 23 years old. Trained in her father Jan Sanders van Hemessen's Antwerp workshop, she is the earliest Flemish woman artist whose work survives in verifiable form, and only eight signed portraits by her are known in public collections. The Florentine writer Ludovico Guicciardini named her in 1567 as one of four notable women artists from Antwerp, and she and her husband, an organist, followed Mary of Hungary to Spain, where they stayed until the queen's death in 1558.

Her sitter remains as anonymous as every other woman here, and her clothes also identify her. A fine shirt edged in black embroidery shows at her neck and wrists, beneath a bodice of corded and watered silk, red velvet sleeves, and a black damask skirt. She holds embroidered gloves, and her belt of black beads in gold settings may once have ended in a pomander, a small gilded vessel for perfume. A little dog with bells on its collar rests under her arm, a common companion in sixteenth-century portraits of wealthy women, painted in the same years by Bronzino in Florence and Antonis Mor at the Habsburg court. The panel is currently on loan to the Museum Snijders&Rockoxhuis in Antwerp for Catharina van Hemessen: Signature Works, an exhibition built around what sets this portrait apart from the rest.

The woman in the pink damask, the bride with the unknown coat of arms, and the provincial Frenchwoman with her ear uncovered all wait on the same kind of discovery, a letter, an inventory, or a matching portrait of a husband that turns up in another collection. Until then, the most precise record of who they were is the one their families paid for, stitched in gold thread and set down in paint.

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