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The Ghirlandaio brothers (Domenico, Davide, Benedetto and Giovanni Battista) operated a flourishing workshop in Florence that decorated chapels with frescoes filled with portraits. Even some of the workshop's large altarpieces contain a multitude of portraits. They also executed several independent portraits. The portrait of Selvaggia Sassetti is the work of Davide.
Many commentators on this portrait observed that the sitter appears to be the same person as the girl standing behind the kneeling girl in the fresco of the Resurrection of the Boy in the Sassetti Chapel in the church of Santa Trinità, Florence. She is one of Sassetti's seven daughters, Selvaggia Margharita (born in 1470). Her wedding in 1488 seems to be the most likely occasion for commissioning the portrait, in which she is more mature than she is in the fresco that was painted three years earlier.
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