Portrait of a Lady in Yellow

portrait

Baldovinetti's profile portrait of an unknown Florentine woman expresses patrician Quattrocento elegance. She is posed in the conventional profile view that is used almost without exception for female portraits until the end of the century, long after male sitters are shown turned toward the observer.

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About the Artist

Alessio Baldovinetti

1425 – 1499

Florentine painter, mosaicist, and worker in stained glass. His training is unknown, but his graceful, and refined style shows the influence of Domenico Veneziano and Fra Angelico. His finest works include a damaged but still enchanting fresco of the Nativity (1460-62) in the forecourt of the SS. Annunziata, Florence, a Madonna and Child (c. 1460) in the Louvre, Paris, and an Annunciation (c. 1460) in the Uffizi, Florence. They show his remarkable sensitivity to light and landscape and his engaging blend of naivety and sophistication. In his History of Italian Renaissance Art (1970), Frederick Hartt writes that Baldovinetti was 'the finest painter in Florence ' in the 1460s, and considers him 'a very gifted master who somehow never quite seemed to fulfil his great initial promise'.

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