Portrait of an African Woman

Painted around 1560, probably in Florence, this woman wears fashionable court dress, a fine white collar and red beads. In her hands she holds an elaborately decorated gilt watch—both a luxury object and a symbol of time.

Her direct gaze is the painting’s most arresting feature. The artist does not reduce the sitter to an exotic accessory: face, posture and costly possession ask us to attend to a particular person whose name has not survived.

The work is among the rare European portraits of an African person from the Renaissance. It opens a discussion about African presence at European courts while also recalling the inequality and slave trade that shaped so many lives in the period.