In this half-length portrait, the lady is wearing a dark brown velvet overdress luxuriously ornamented with gold chain-stitched embroidery, slit sleeves, and a high collar open in front in the Flemish style. This is a notable example of Spanish portraiture during the reign of Philip II. To begin with, it is painted on a finegrained reddish tropical wood, mahogany perhaps, a support that was quite unusual in sixteenth-century painting. Another element that bears remarking is the folding Japanese-type fan the lady is carrying, a nod to the customs and portrayals of women from Portugal, where the first Oriental fans arrived in the late fifteenth century. The links by marriage between the courts of Madrid and Lisbon brought this accessory to Spain and other European capitals. Fans soon became a part of every noble woman’s vestments, as well as an instrument of courtship and flirtation and an indicator of social standing; they joined the traditional handkerchiefs and missals held by elite sitters for portraits. In this case, the lady is holding the fan in a somewhat strange and original way: she holds the base in her right hand and seems to caress it with her left, whose fingers, the two middle ones oddly crossed, are extended rather stiffly. One might ask whether this portrayal corresponds to some court formula of flirtation or courtship, some specific meaning, but for the moment this is no more than a hypothesis impossible to prove.

The arrangement of the lady’s arms, the fact that the right hand has been partly cut off, and the irregularities in the perimeter of the painting indicate that the work was originally larger, and possibly conceived as a seated portrait, similar to some images of ladies of the upper nobility painted by Titian (Empress Isabel of Portugal, 1548, Prado), Antonio Moro (Mary Tudor, Queen of England, 1554, Prado), and Sánchez Coello himself (Princess Juana, Descalzas Reales). It may, in fact, be the portrait described in 1686 in the inventory of the small pieces in the vaults -a lady holding a fan painted on wood panel- whose dimensions were similar to those of the portrait of Mary Tudor painted by Moro (Prado, P2108) and the portrait by Titian’s studio of Philip II with an ermine collar (Prado, P452). In the inventory of assets included in the testamentary documents of Ferdinand VII, the work is attributed to Sánchez Coello, at a value of 800 reales, quite high in comparison to other portraits (El Greco’s Nobleman with His Hand on His Chest, for example, valued at 540 reales). Somewhat later, in the Prado’s general inventory of 1849, the subject of the portrait was identified as a Spanish infanta. She is probably one of the sisters of Philip II.

This suggestion was ignored later, despite the fact that the lady’s features are quite reminiscent of the characteristic features of the Spanish Austrians: the light eyes with circles under them, the bridge of the nose, the somewhat triangular chin, and the abundant, curly, reddish hair.

In the view of Stephanie Breuer, neither the technique nor the composition of the work reflects the usual characteristics of Sánchez Coello, and María Kusche has attributed it to Flemish painter Rolan de Mois. On the other hand, Carmen Garrido, who studied the painting for the catalogue of the exhibition that the Prado dedicated to Sánchez Coello (in which, however, the painting was not included), has praised the quality of the work and notes its technical parallelism with other portraits by this artist. Finally, a recent cleaning of the painting has cleared up many of the doubts as to its attribution, and the name of Sánchez Coello seems most appropriate to explain the pictorial resolution of the head, which is quite descriptive and delicate in its handling, although this hypothesis cannot, of course, be considered conclusive (Ruiz, L.: El Greco to Goya. Masterpieces from the Prado Museum, Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2012, pp. 121-122).