Portrait of a Lady, bust-length, in a white shirt and red dress, holding a piece of fruit

It is a testament to Palma il Vecchio’s assimilation of Venetian colorito that Vasari calls him ‘Venetian’, though he was in fact born near Bergamo on the terraferma. By March 1510, Palma was in Venice, where he must have studied works by Giovanni Bellini with close attention, likely with Bellini’s own student Andrea Previtali. His style subsequently evolved to challenge the young Titian who, after the death of Giorgione later that year and the departure of Sebastiano del Piombo for Rome in 1511, was the unrivalled painter of the younger generation in the city. Palma himself gained a considerable clientele in Venice and founded an artistic dynasty that survived for over a century.

The present painting is suffused with the sensuous sfumato so characteristic of Palma’s portraits. The golden apple in the sitter’s grasp associates her with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty who won this object in the famed Judgement of Paris. The slightly knowing gleam in her eye hints at the divine irony of this moment of exchange which would ignite the Trojan War.

Though the sitter has sometimes been identified as the artist’s daughter Violante (Zanotto, op. cit., 1856), she is a type to which Palma often returned and which responds to the beauty standards of the period. Her long golden hair, fair skin, thinly arched brows, rounded dark eyes, small mouth, dimpled chin, plump white hands, broad shoulders and gently curving bosom were identified as prized features of beauty in the 1548 Delle bellezze delle donne (On the Beauty of Women) by the humanist Agnolo Firenzuola.

This picture is thought to have been in Palma’s studio at the time of his death. Though there is some discrepancy with the size of the work there recorded, that both the sumptuous red velvet of her dress and the apple in her hand are mentioned in the catalogue of his studio provides persuasive evidence to the presence of this work there (Rylands, op. cit., 1992). It later formed part of the renowned collection of more than 450 paintings amassed by the financier and tobacco magnate, Marchese Girolamo Manfrin, after he purchased Palazzo Venier (renamed Palazzo Manfrin) in Venice in 1787. Manfrin was advised by Giovanni Battista Mingardi and Pietro Edwards: the latter's manuscript list of the paintings compiled in 1794 includes a portrait tentatively attributed to Paris Bordone which is most likely identifiable with the present work (see Provenance and Literature). The collection passed by descent into the family until 1851, when a manuscript catalogue was prepared and negotiations began to sell it in its entirety. A group of works were sold five years later, but this portrait remained in the Manfrin Collection until 1868, when it was purchased by an ancestor of the present owner.