Retrato de Uma Jovem (Portrait of a Young Woman) - Lorenzo di Credi

 

Retrato de Uma Jovem (Portrait of a Young Woman) - Lorenzo di Credi
Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Nova York, Estados Unidos
OST - 58x40 - Circa 1490-1500


This damaged but evocative portrait has been identified as the widow of Credi's brother, who was a goldsmith. This would explain why she is dressed in black and holds a ring. The juniper bush (ginepro) behind her could refer to her name, Ginevra di Giovanni di Niccolò. The picture was inspired by Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
This painting reflects an important step in the evolution of Florentine portraits of women: earlier examples almost always show them bust-length and in profile. The change came about in the mid-1470s in the work of the young Leonardo da Vinci and, slightly later, in the work of Botticelli. In the new format, women turn their faces toward the spectator, giving artists greater opportunity to describe their personalities. By increasing the length of portraits, artists could include the sitters' hands and show the sitters in more natural poses.
An old, probably sixteenth-century, inscription on the back of The Met's panel identifies the sitter as Ginevra d'Amerigo de' Benci, the same young woman whom Leonardo depicted in a portrait in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Ginevra, the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker, was born in 1457; in 1474 she married Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini. Leonardo probably painted her portrait about the time of their marriage. The Met's painting is clearly inspired by Leonardo's portrait. Although the pose of the sitter is reversed, the format of the two pictures is virtually the same, and the resemblance is even greater if one bears in mind that the portrait in Washington has been cut by about seven inches at the bottom and about one-half inch on the right side, so that both portraits originally were about the same size. Although a drawing by Leonardo in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, has often been cited as a study for the missing hands of Leonardo's portrait in Washington, The Met's portrait probably provides more reliable evidence.
The attribution to Lorenzo di Credi was proposed by Berenson (1896). Credi received his training in Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop when Leonardo da Vinci and Perugino were also employed there. Vasari wrote that "since Lorenzo [di Credi] took an extraordinary pleasure in the manner of Leonardo, he contrived to imitate it so well that there was no one who came nearer to it than he did in the high finish and thorough perfection of his works" (de Vere trans., 1996, vol. 1, p. 800). Credi's free copy of Leonardo's Benois Madonna in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, not to speak of his variant of the Ginevra de' Benci in the Metropolitan Museum, lends credence to Vasari's account.
The attribution to Credi is widely accepted today, though it occasionally has been questioned: Bode (1921) tentatively gave it to Credi's student Giovan Antonio Sogliani, Alazard (1924) dismissed it as "a work of no great artistic value," and David Alan Brown (1998) ascribed it to the prolific follower of Credi known as Tommaso. Doubts about the attribution may be due to the portrait's compromised condition. Unlike Leonardo's picture in Washington, the surface of which is well preserved, The Met's version is badly abraded—the face is badly damaged, the dark pigments have deteriorated, and little detail remains in the clothing and the landscape. The surface is so poorly preserved that it shows no sign of the high finish for which Credi was known in his time.
The poor condition of the portrait also precludes any firm conclusion about the identity of the sitter. Nevertheless, some scholars (Bode 1903, Walker 1967, Schuyler 1976, Garrard 2006) maintain that it portrays Ginevra de' Benci; while others (Carnescchi 1909, Sirén 1916, Alazard 1924, Brown 1998) believe that it does not. In the earliest published reproduction of the portrait (Bode 1903), in which it appears to be in much better condition than it is today, the sitter's features correspond closely with those of the Washington portrait. A radiograph of the The Met's panel shows various contours for the position of the woman's head, changes presumably due to the artist's inexperience. The radiograph also reveals that the neckline of her dress was originally rectangular and cut much lower, in fact, exactly like the neckline of the dress in the Washington portrait.
Discounting the old inscription on the back, Gigetta Dalli Regoli (1966) suggested that the portrait depicts a different Ginevra—Ginevra di Giovanni di Niccolò, the reputed widow of Lorenzo di Credi's older brother Carlo, who was a goldsmith. The juniper foliage, behind the sitters' heads in both the New York and Washington portraits, alludes to their Christian name, the Italian word for the plant—ginepro—being a play on the name Ginevra. The ring held by the sitter in The Met's portrait could refer to her late husband's profession, but it might also have had some connubial significance. On balance, making allowances for its compromised condition, the portrait probably does represent Ginevra de' Benci.
Dalli Regoli (1966) at first proposed that The Met's picture dates from about 1490–95. Thirty years later (1996) she wrote that the design of the portrait reflects Leonardo's Mona Lisa, thereby dating the picture considerably later, because Leonardo began the Mona Lisa about 1505 and did not complete it until 1514. Judging from style alone, The Met's portrait probably dates from the late 1470s when Credi copied early works by Leonardo.