Probably by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, Portrait of a Woman in Profile

A pale young woman is set against a dark background. She is dressed sombrely but stylishly: her fair, frizzy hair is drawn back under an elaborate sparkling net. She has several necklaces and she is wearing an olive green gown. It is tightly laced across her chest and slit at the shoulder to show her red-and-white striped underdress.

We do not know who she was, but she was presumably a member of the Sforza court in Milan in the last years of the fifteenth century. The artist, Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, was the court painter there and her dress was in fashion in the 1490s. On her belt are the letters LO and an image of the head of a Black African man, in profile – possibly an allusion to Ludovico el Moro [‘Ludovico the Moor’], Duke of Milan, although it was not one of his usual emblems.

Strangely, this painting was made over the top of another. The panel was first used, the other way up, for a different portrait, a profile of a young man. Infrared reflectography shows underdrawing for an eye, nose, hair and a hat, which was apparently at least partly painted.

The strict profile suggests that this was an official portrait, but the lady is not dressed with the opulence of the highest aristocracy. She was probably not a member of the ducal family. It was once thought that she might be a mistress of Ludovico’s but given the painting’s formal nature this is perhaps unlikely. It is conceivable that this could be a portrait of his illegitimate daughter, Bianca Giovanna, born in 1482. Ludovico was immensely fond of Bianca, and arranged her marriage to the condottiere and commander of his army, Galeazzo Sanseverino, in 1496. When she died a few months later el Moro wrote a touching letter to her mother, saying that for him their daughter would always be alive. We will probably never be sure of the sitter’s real identity.

Profile portraits like this were hugely popular in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, for both men and women – as in Alesso Baldovinetti’s Portrait of a Lady and Giovanni da Oriolo’s Leonello d'Este. The style continued for official portraits even after Leonardo da Vinci had introduced a more naturalistic model to Milan with his Lady with an Ermine (National Museum, Kraków). It perhaps had connotations of aristocracy, and parallels with antique coins and contemporary portrait medals.

De Predis painted a number of profile studies of the ducal family and their connections, including portraits of Bianca Maria Sforza (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and her husband Emperor Maximilian I (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). He also worked with Leonardo on The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel, for which he painted An Angel in Red with a Lute.