Portrait of a lady as Saint Catherine of Alexandria

This unpublished panel is a characteristic work by Puligo, a gifted pupil of Andrea del Sarto who by the time of his relatively early death in 1527 had built up one of the most successful portrait practices in Florence. To the twenty-five portraits, all on panel, listed by Elena Capretti and Serena Padovani (in the exhibition catalogue Domenico Puligo (1492-1527), Un protagonista dimenticato della pittura fiorentina, Florence, 2002) can be added this female portrait, another in a Scottish private collection and a third at Haddo House (the National Trust for Scotland). A number of those in British collections were formerly attributed to Andrea del Sarto, in whose workshop Puligo completed his training and whose technique he clearly studied very closely. Many of Puligo's portraits are of larger half-length format, and one of these, the Barbarina Fiorentina, the programme of which was devised by the historian Niccolò Macchiavelli, is of considerable iconographic complexity. This example is one of a few in which the sitter is given the attribute of a saint whose name she presumably bore: two of ladies as the Madgdalen (Maria Maddalena was a popular name in Florence) are known at Ottawa and, formerly, in the Kisters Collection (Capretti and Padovani, nos. 41 and 66); one of a lady as Saint Barbara is at Saint Petersburg (Hermitage, no. 1477, op. cit., no. 50). That no other portrait by the artist includes the attribute of Saint Catherine of Alexandria strengthens the probability that this panel is that recorded in the Amadeo dal Pozzo inventory of 1634, as Burton Fredericksen suggested to the compiler in 1997.