Akin to the rhyming quatrain, the School of Fontainebleau painters developed a scheme that unfolds Poppaea’s persona visually. At the top of the composition, her veil and curiously arranged hands would have immediately evoked the virtuous model of Pudicitia. As a viewer took in her erotic form and inscribed name, her identity would emerge as the disreputable Poppaea. For 16th-century viewers, this jarring incongruity cast Poppaea as the ultimate subversion of female virtue, intensifying the negative stereotype of the femme fatale through pictorial means.
With the panel trimmed down and the hands painted over, the identity of the figure in the Norton Simon’s painting was obscured. It is not known why these changes were made. Were the hands rendered unsuccessfully and immediately blotted out? Was the wooden panel damaged by water, necessitating modifications? Or was a later owner scandalized by and prompted to censor Poppaea’s nudity? Whatever the cause, the deception led to the painting’s misidentification as a portrait of Diane de Poitiers.
Technical analysis, specifically the use of X-radiography and IRR, unveils the figure's hands and, consequently, her identity as Poppaea Sabina. The allusion to Pudicitia unveils yet another layer, one that speaks to attitudes toward women that have pervaded history, and, as the Norton Simon’s Poppaea Sabina demonstrates, the history of art. As the painting continues its life at the Museum, more layers of the painting and its complex history may yet be revealed.
Figure 1: School of Fontainebleau (French, 16th century), Poppaea Sabina with IRR overlay, c. 1550, oil on panel, 16-3/8 x 12-7/8 in. (41.6 x 32.7 cm), Norton Simon Art Foundation, from the Estate of Jennifer Jones Simon, M.2010.1.174.P