In this portrait a lady is shown in three-quarter-length, turned slightly to the right, her left hand resting on a spaniel seated on a cushion to her left. She wears a red dress with a white ruff and sleeves and a pink rose and ribbon in her hair.

A clue to the sitter’s identity is provided by the architecture of the window-embrasure behind her, which suggests that she is standing within the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino. The distinctive window-seat resting on one baluster is one of those constructed by Laurana, and also features in the background of Barocci’s Madonna del Gatto (National Gallery, London). On this basis the sitter has been identified as Lavinia della Rovere, Marchesa del Vasto (1558-1632), the sister of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino. This portrait and a second version in the Hermitage are thought to be workshop copies after a lost original by Barocci which was referred to in a poem by Bernardino Baldi, published in 1590. An apparently similar picture is recorded, without attribution, in the 1631 inventory of the Urbino pictures. The original portrait may have been commissioned to commemorate Lavinia della Rovere’s marriage to Alfonso Felice d’Avalos at Pesaro in 1583.

The son of a watchmaker, Barocci was born in Urbino, one of the great cultural centres of the Renaissance, around 1533. He was afforded early and intimate contact with the works of Titian, before working with a number of Rome’s leading painters. Barocci enjoyed the constant patronage of the Dukes of Urbino and died one of the wealthiest and most influential painters in Italy.