Portrait of a Young Girl (Christus)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Portrait of a Young Girl (or Portrait of a Young Lady), now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, is one of the last paintings completed by Netherlandish artist Petrus Christus. Executed in oil on oak panel after 1460, likely c. 1470, the small portrait marks a stylistic advance in the both Christus's work and the development of Netherlandish portraiture. The sitter is no longer set against a neutral flat background, but placed in a three-dimensional, realistic setting. Moreover, the girl is not passive; she looks directly at the viewer in an almost petulant manner, although much is held back in her reserved gaze. Portrait of a Young Girl is a further development from the portraits of Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden, and has been highly influential. In part its appeal is in the sly expression of the sitter, which is accentuated by the fact of her eyes not quite being aligned.
It was purchased by the Medici family and recorded in their inventory as "a small panel painted with the head of a French lady, coloured in oil, the work of Pietro Cresci from Bruges". Their record does not address the matter of the girl's identity, indicating that their interest was more in the painting's aesthetic rather than historical value. It entered the Prussian royal collection with the purchase in 1821 of the Edward Solly collection.
The painting shows a bust length portrait of a girl with porcelain skin, almond and slightly oriental eyes and a petulant mouth. There is a tradition that the portrait is of a member of the English Talbot family, likely either Anne or Margaret Talbot, daughters of John Talbot, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury (who was dead by then). It is known that the sitter's parents married between 1444 and 1445, suggesting her age to be between 10–20. She may have travelled to Bruges to attend the famously lavish wedding in 1468 of Margaret of York, sister of King Edward IV of England, to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
The girl is dressed in exquisite cloth and jewellery and possesses an unusual elegance. The paintings crop gives a tight focus on her head and on the detail of her visual expression, it examines the relationship between artist, model, patron and viewer. Christus depicts her looking out of the canvas in an oblique but self-aware manner that some critics and historians find unnerving. Critic Joel Upton described her as "a polished pearl, almost opalescent, lying on a cushion of black velvet."
Christus frames the girl in an almost architectural manner which is both rigid and balanced. She is placed in a narrow horizontal triangular space. The wall behind her is largely flat, although the image is divided by the right angle joining the inverted triangle formed by her dress, and the horizontal linear description of her neck, face and headdress. The rendering of the background departs somewhat from the then conventions in portraiture; Christus sets her against a parallel wall which is defined both in terms of material (the lower half is a wooden dado), and by its shadow, its distance from the girl. Here the model is set in a recognisable interior, naturalistic enough to be within her own home.
She is lit from the left and throws a murky but curved shadow on the wall to her right that acts as a counterpoint to the contour of her cheek and hairline. The curve of the tail of her head-dress is echoed and continued by the curve of her neck and shoulder. This style of hat seems have evolved from the truncated hennin, also in fashion in Burgundy. A very similar style, with no tail, is seen on the older of two stylish girls who have donor portraits in a Presentation of Christ by the "Master of the Prado Adoration of the Magi", a pupil of van der Weyden, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The black tail coming under the chin is found very rarely if at all in other images from the period, and has been interpreted as a style borrowed from the male chaperon hat, which always has a long tailing cornette, sometimes worn in this way.
