Many of the most famous faces in painting belong to women whose names were never written down, or were lost along the way. A portrait was retitled to hide its sitter. A painter was called before the Inquisition to explain a woman lying on a green divan. Behind each of these twelve faces sits the same simple question: who was she?
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How These Were Chosen
For centuries, a painted woman was rarely the one who decided anything about her picture. A husband ordered her portrait, a painter hired her to pose, or he chose her face to suit an idea. Others then hung the canvas, sold it and gave it a title.
That is why her name so often goes missing. The painting survives, the face becomes famous, and the person who sat for it slips away, or is given a name that was never hers.
Each painting chosen here is famous, and each raises that question about the woman in it: who she was, and what became of her name. Some answers are documented, others are still argued over. They run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Raphael, La Donna Velata (about 1512 to 1515)
A long veil falls over the young woman's head and shoulders, and her right hand rests near her heart. She is still called only La Velata, the veiled woman, five centuries after Raphael painted her, around 1512 to 1515.
That veil is the first clue to who she was. Worn over the hair, it marked a married woman. Whom she married, and what her own name was, nobody has established.
That has not stopped people from naming her. In 1839, the scholar Passavant proposed the Fornarina, a nickname that nineteenth century writers gave to Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker from Siena.
Her clothes argue against a baker's daughter. A diadem holds a pendant of a square cut ruby and a sapphire ending in a pearl, and a necklace decorated with figured enamels sits at her throat. Silk and jewels this rich point instead to a commissioned portrait of a noblewoman.
Raphael gave that dress as much care as the face. He kept her face slightly in shadow and let the dark ground lift the pink of her skin, then built the huge left sleeve in the foreground out of pale silk worked white on white, fold after fold. The dress tells us her rank. It does not tell us her name.
At a Glance
Artist: Raphael (1483 to 1520)
Painted: About 1512 to 1515
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 82 × 60.5 cm (32.3 × 23.8 in)
Where to see it: Palatine Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Room of Jupiter)
11. Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Battista Sforza (about 1473 to 1475)
Battista Sforza appears in strict profile, very pale against a wide landscape, on one of two small panels, and her husband faces her from the other. When Piero della Francesca painted the pair, around 1473 to 1475, she could no longer sit for him.