Portrait of a Woman, Possibly a Novice of San Secondo (c. 1490): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Woman, Possibly a Novice of San Secondo (c. 1490) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacometto Veneziano (Italian, 1497).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Scholars have recently speculated that this work does not actually depict a nun, although it has been described as such since 1543. A beautiful young woman presented as saintly, a regular occurrence, the sitter may be the wife or daughter of Alvise Contarini. Her attire, particularly the head garb, may be secular, while some scholars consider it to be Benedictine or Dominican. The San Secondo convent was reserved for daughters of the wealthiest Venetians and conventions of dress were fairly loose until 1515 when strict reforms were enforced by religious and political authorities in Venice.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman, Possibly a Novice of San Secondo
• Date: c. 1490
• Creator attribution: Jacometto Veneziano (Italian, 1497)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 30.5 x 24 x 3 cm (12 x 9 7/16 x 1 3/16 in.); Unframed: 24 x 17.5 cm (9 7/16 x 6 7/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 15th Century and earlier
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1976.9

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Antonello, Ferdinando Bologna, and Federico De Melis. Antonello da Messina. 2013.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Periti, Giancarla. In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.