Portrait of a Woman

The Master of the Nativity of Castello's Portrait of a Woman, painted around 1450 for the Metropolitan Museum, is one of the finest profile portraits from mid-fifteenth-century Florence. The anonymous master, named for a Nativity scene in the Castello villa, was a skilled painter working in the circle of Filippo Lippi. This work belongs to the Early Renaissance, the transformative period in European art when painters first applied mathematical perspective, naturalistic figure modeling, and archaeological interest in antiquity to the inherited traditions of medieval devotional painting. The tension between Gothic grace and Renaissance structure gives art of this period a distinctive energy.

The profile portrait renders the sitter with precise attention to the fashionable hairstyle, jewelry, and dress of a Florentine noblewoman, the sharp profile silhouetted against a plain background in the convention of mid-Quattrocento Florentine portraiture.