Portrait of a Woman known as The Courtesan

The woman wears over her white blouse a beautiful and rich surcoat, probably of silk damask, dyed red, the color at the time among the most precious and sought-after.Like other female portraits of Venetian production, characterized by strong eroticism, this one has traditionally been considered a portrait of a courtesan. In fact, the typology of early 16th-century Venetian female portraits to which this painting belongs has precise references to the theme of marriage.The women depicted often expose a breast, a doorway to the soul and heart, a symbol of fecundity, an offering of love, a seductive lure.
The fact that one breast is shown and the other partly covered does not signify an antithesis between voluptuousness and virtue, but a co-presence of enunciated and lived eroticism, and moderate and guarded eroticism that is realized in marriage. The woman depicted here has long, loose hair, a long-standing tradition for brides in the Veneto; she has loosened her mantle, which is slipping off her body, and is wearing a white blouse, an emblematic element of the wedding trousseau and also a symbol of chastity. The association between red and white, the colors of love, also corresponds to this interpretive key.
The power of female sexuality is expressed not only through the display of the body, but also and especially through the established mechanisms of gestures and gaze.Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, a native of the Bergamo area but Venetian by adoption, was famous for producing these half-length images of flourishing and prococious female beauties, reinterpreting an invention that had been Titian’s. The painting, datable to about 1520, is in the artist’s late production. The painting technique, which gives the color surface a fragile, parched appearance, is echoed in other works from the painter’s later activity and confirms this dating.