Many medieval and Renaissance paintings prominently feature women’s head coverings, providing a visual record of the styles and cultural norms of the time. These paintings offer insight into the variety of head coverings worn across different regions, classes, and stages of life.
Portrait of a Young Girl (Petrus Christus c. 1465-1470)
Portrait of a Young Girl is a small oil-on-oak panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus. It was completed towards the end of his life, between 1465 and 1470, and is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It marks a major stylistic advance in contemporary portraiture; the girl is set in an airy, three-dimensional, realistic setting, and stares out at the viewer with a complicated expression that is reserved, yet intelligent and alert.
Portrait of a Lady (Rogier van der Weyden c. 1460)
Portrait of a Lady (or Portrait of a Woman) is a small oil-on-oak panel painting executed around 1460 by the Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. The composition is built from the geometric shapes that form the lines of the woman’s veil, neckline, face, and arms, and by the fall of the light that illuminates her face and headdress. The vivid contrasts of darkness and light enhance the almost unnatural beauty and Gothic elegance of the model.
And now we go and spoil a perfectly nice BLOTT. What would modern AI image generation make of the Wikipedia descriptions of these masterpieces?
WLBOTT: Elder G, can you create an oil painting based on this prompt: “The composition is built from the geometric shapes that form the lines of the woman’s veil, neckline, face, and arms, and by the fall of the light that illuminates her face and headdress. The vivid contrasts of darkness and light enhance the almost unnatural beauty and Gothic elegance of the model.”
Portrait of Maria Portinari (Hans Memling c. 1470–72)
Portrait of Maria Portinari is a small c. 1470–72 painting by Hans Memling in tempera and oil on oak panel. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. She is about 14 years old, and depicted shortly before her wedding to the Italian banker, Tommaso Portinari. Maria is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century fashion, with a long black hennin with a transparent veil and an elaborate jewel-studded necklace. Her headdress is similar and a necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes’s later Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling’s portrait.
Portrait of Isabella d’Este is an oil on canvas painting of a young woman by Titian. It can be dated to the 1530s and is held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna.
The artist and the date are undisputed. Beyond the museum documentation, there are several doubts about the person depicted.
Depicted is a young woman as a half figure in a chair with an armrest against a dark background. She stares slightly to the left. Personal features are light blond curls, the eye colour light grey, flat eyebrows and a snub nose, overall not representing the ideal of beauty. She wears a balzo (a fashion invention of Isabella d’Este, but widely popular in northern Italy in the 1530s). Her clothes are dark; she wears green patterned sleeves, a gold shirt and a fur (probably lynx).
Interesting AI interpretation:
The Lady with an Ermine (Leonardo da Vinci c. 1489-1490)
This portrait of Cecilia Gallerani shows her with her hair partially covered by a delicate net, a popular fashion among high-born women. The restraint in her hairstyle, combined with the refined net, reflects elegance and social status.
The Lady with an Ermine is a portrait painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. Dated to c. 1489–1491, the work is painted in oils on a panel of walnut wood. Its subject is Cecilia Gallerani, a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan; Leonardo was painter to the Sforza court in Milan at the time of its execution. It is the second of only four surviving portraits of women painted by Leonardo, the others being Ginevra de’ Benci, La Belle Ferronnière and the Mona Lisa.
Cecilia Gallerani (left) and Ermine
In 1939, anticipating the German occupation of Poland, [the painting] was again moved to Sieniawa, but it was discovered and seized by the Nazis and sent to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. In 1940, Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, saw the painting there and requested it be returned to Kraków, where it hung in his suite of offices in the Wawel Castle. …At the end of the Second World War it was discovered by Allied troops in Frank’s country home in Schliersee, Bavaria, and was returned to Poland in 1946.
… Throughout the mid–late 20th century the work traveled the world more extensively than any other Leonardo painting, being exhibited in Warsaw (1952), Moscow (1972), Washington, D.C. (1991/92), Malmö (1993/94), Rome/Milan (1998), Florence (1999).
