Portrait of a Woman

portrait

The sitter of the painting is the wife of a Florentine banker. The coiffure of the woman is characteristic for the period: a wig (seuffia) on top of the head decorated with curls of different colour. Although this portrait and its pendant representing the husband are catalogued in the Berlin museum under the name of Bastiano Mainardi, Domenico Ghirlandaio's follower and posthumous brother-in-law, recent research attributes them to Davide Ghirlandaio.

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About the Artist

Bastiano Mainardi

1466 – 1513

Bastiano (Sebastiano) Mainardi, Italian painter, the brother-in-law of Domenico Ghirlandaio. Vasari mentioned that Mainardi was a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio and that he was still working in the studio at the time of his master’s death. Vasari also claimed that Mainardi collaborated with Ghirlandaio on several works between 1475 and 1477, including the fresco decoration of the chapel of S Fina in the Collegiata, San Gimignano, and on the frescoes in the abbey of Passignano in Val di Pesa, near Florence. Given the dates of these works, it was thought that Mainardi was born between 1450 and 1460 and that he was, if not a contemporary of Ghirlandaio’s, certainly one of his earliest collaborators, together with Ghirlandaio’s brother Davide. The discovery that Mainardi was born in 1466 (Venturini) would suggest that the two painters’ relationship was that of master and pupil, at least until the early 1480s. Certainly Mainardi could not have collaborated on the frescoes in the Collegiata.

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