Portrait of a Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Portrait of a Woman with a Pearl Necklace at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is one of Costa's most refined female portraits, showing a young woman adorned with the pearl necklace that was the defining luxury object of late fifteenth-century Italian female portraiture. Pearls signified purity, wealth, and marriageability simultaneously, and their careful depiction in portraiture was both a display of the sitter's social status and a demonstration of the painter's technical virtuosity. Costa's female portraits reflect the influence of his Ferrarese training, where precise, linear handling and psychological reserve characterised the school's approach to feminine subjects, and this work shows him at his most accomplished within that tradition.

The pearl necklace required Costa's most precise technical attention: each pearl must show its translucent lustre, its curved highlight, and its placement on the string, while the whole necklace must read as a coherent object against the dressed figure. The face is rendered with smooth, carefully graduated flesh tones characteristic of Ferrarese practice.