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Original fileThe sitter is depicted from the chest up, wearing an intricately detailed gown and a prominent gold pendant set with a ruby, emerald, and sapphire, finished with a large teardrop pearl. She gazes slightly away from the viewer against a backdrop of a pale blue sky and a single, slender tree in a distant, minimalist landscape. The oil-on-panel surface exhibits a dense network of fine craquelure throughout.
This portrait reflects the early 16th-century Florentine ideal of beauty as a reflection of inner virtue, a concept central to the Neoplatonic revival. The jewelry, particularly the unicorn-topped pendant and the specific arrangement of gemstones, serves as an iconographic program signifying the sitter's chastity and moral purity according to contemporary lapidary traditions.
Camillo Leonardi, Speculum Lapidum
Leonardi's 1502 treatise on the virtues of stones provides the contemporary philosophical context for the symbolic ruby, emerald, and sapphire worn by the sitter.
Marsilio Ficino
Ficino's Neoplatonic philosophy regarding the spiritual significance of physical beauty as a 'splendor of the divine' informed the aesthetic goals of Raphael's Florentine period.
Object
Oil on panel
portrait
Linked Data
AI AI-cataloged fields generated by gemini-3-flash-preview on April 1, 2026. Getty identifiers are AI-inferred and may require verification.