Portrait of a Young Woman

Portrait of a Young Woman, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of Lorenzo di Credi's finest surviving portraits, showing a young Florentine woman in three-quarter view against a neutral dark ground. The portrait is thought to have been painted around 1490 and belongs to the series of female portraits of Florentine patrician or merchant women that Verrocchio's circle produced in the 1470s through 1490s. Its affinities with Leonardo's slightly earlier female portraits—including the Ginevra de' Benci—demonstrate the shared stylistic origins of both painters in Verrocchio's bottega.

The woman's face is modeled with smooth, graduated tonal transitions in oil that create the soft volume of cheeks and brow without the harder definition of earlier tempera portraits. Her costume—a detailed brocade—is rendered with the meticulous textile description expected in a portrait intended to demonstrate the sitter's social standing.