Master of the Female Half-Lengths, 'A Female Head', about 1540

A young woman with brown, plaited hair and plucked eyebrows gazes modestly downward. Her hairstyle is Italianate: her plaits are wound around the top of her head and are entwined with a semi-transparent scarf that falls across her right shoulder. A reddish gem in a gold setting is fixed into the plaits above the parting. She wears a semi-transparent ruched chemise and a blue overdress trimmed with brown fur. A green textile hangs behind her, the pale yellow patterns probably intended to represent threads of gold. It has a yellow fringe, behind which is a purple hanging with a yellow pattern.

She is possibly the Virgin Mary: she very closely resembles the Virgin in the Adoration of the Kings (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), also attributed to Master of the Female Half-Lengths, and in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The hangings behind the young woman are like the draperies in the Berlin Adoration. Our panel has been cut down on all four sides, and may be a fragment of a much larger Nativity or Adoration.

In style and technique this picture seems to agree very well with the figures in the Rest on the Flight mentioned above. Very large numbers of paintings are attributed to the Master, not all by the same artist, but many of them may have been produced in the same large workshop. This picture was probably by the Master himself, who had some rather idiosyncratic painting techniques. Here, for example he ingeniously blotted the paint layers in order to depict the semi-transparent fabric of the veil. In the flesh and the chemise he used stiff brushes, or perhaps even toothed tools, to apply the paint more thinly and smoothly.