Woman playing a guitar

This is the portrait of an unknown young lady from Vicenza with a sad frowning look, holding a guitar in her hands. The girl, sitting sideways, letting her white blouse and heavy cloak slip down her arm, reveals her well shaped bare shoulder and turns her head towards the onlooker. The artist renders her melancholy, detached expression with psychological perspicacity, thanks also to the use of the intense contrasting light and to the use of cold, discordant colours.

The painting, probably dating back to the mid Forties of the seventeenth century, is one of the numerous examples of the rich production of portraits by Giulio Carpioni who, according to Girolamo Gualdo (1650), painted the “beautiful ladies of the town” so that the members of the most illustrious and noble families in Vicenza could know and appreciate his work.

The painting, considered together with two other works by the same artist, the Allegory of Painting in the city Museum in Padua and the Woman with a glove in the Civic Art Gallery (Inv. A 95), has also been interpreted in an allegorical key: the Woman playing a guitar would allude to one of the five senses, hearing, the other lady in Vicenza holding a glove in her hand would represent touch, while the painting in Padua would refer to sight. The roses that the young woman in this picture wears in her hair have also been interpreted as a reference to Spring.

“The mysterious charge emanating from the figure is linked to the dual effect that involves anyone who admires the painting: realistic like a portrait and elusive like a complicated allegory” (Pietrogiovanna).