Parmigianino's painting portrays a young lady in sixteenth-century clothes whose identity is unknown and who received the nickname of Schiava in the eighteenth century due to the exotic references of clothing. The girl with brown hair and big green eyes is portrayed in half figure wearing a blue silk robe with puffed sleeves and on her shoulders she wears a striped veil in gold and orange. In her lap she has the zinale, a very light and embroidered apron. On her head she has a donut-shaped hairstyle, the "capigliara" or leap, made up of a network of gold threads, decorated, in the center, by a medallion with a winged Pegasus, a metaphor for loving and poetic initiation, or perhaps heraldic reference to the family to which it belongs. It is a fashion headdress in the Lombardy and Po Valley area in the sixteenth century, also worn by Isabella d'Este, a lady from Mantua. In the ring finger of her left hand she wears a golden ring, perhaps because she was a young bride, while holding a fan of ostrich feathers tied with a chain to the sleeve of her dress. The portrait is among the most fascinating and expressive, as well as the best known, of the artist: the mischievous sensuality of the subject is enhanced by the gaze fixed on the observer, by the ambiguous smile and by the compositional skill of the curvilinear rhythms that frame the figure. . The slightly slanted position gives a sense of three-dimensionality. The painting must be placed around 1532, in the same years in which Parmigianino was in Parma and was studying the decoration for the Steccata, the latest example of his technical research. For the identification, still uncertain, the names of Giulia Gonzaga, wife of Vespasiano Colonna, or that of the poetess of Parma Veronica Gambara, whom Parmigianino knew personally, have been proposed. The painting, which was in the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo de 'Medici, passed to the Uffizi in 1675, bequeathed to the Medici wardrobe. In 1928 it was given to the Parma Gallery in exchange for two thirteenth-century panels from the Tacoli Canacci collection.
Title: Portrait of a gentlewoman known as "The Turkish Slave"
Author: Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, detto Parmigianino
Date: 1532
Technique: Oil on the table
Displayed in: National Gallery
All ongoing and upcoming exhibitions where there are works by