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The witty conceit of painting a picture within a picture has been splendidly adopted by Pulzone for this portrait of a noblewoman. The trompe l'oeil curtain draped across the upper left corner of the canvas, alludes to a convention more typical of Renaissance portraiture, in which drapery was ofter depicted as a backdrop to the sitter and it may also refer to the custom of covering paintings with curtains. The curtain folds hang very convincingly over the canvas, casting a sharp shadow across the surface, and wrapping themselves around the tacked edge of the fictive unframed canvas.
Some critics identified the sitter as Maria de' Medici, born in 1573, the daughter of Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici, and later Queen of France when she married Henri IV in 1600. In 1594, the year in which this picture was painted, Maria would have been twenty-one years old. Most single-figure portraits of Maria post-date her wedding and show the sitter almost twenty years older.
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