The drawing depicts a young woman standing, wearing a typical house dress that German women used to wear at the end of the 15th century when the drawing was made. The outfit includes a long skirt, which is wide around the waist and belly, a tight bodice with long sleeves and an embroidered collar that goes over the shoulders. The young woman is wearing a large cap that gathers her hair and on her waist there is a little purse. She has a handkerchief in her hand. The picture is made with pen and slightly colored watercolors on the face and in the right side of the bodice and it is part of a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer preserved at the Ambrosiana in Milan. It consists of drawings with various subjects that were part of cardinal Federico Fagnani’s collection and they came to Biblioteca Ambrosiana’s collection a year after his death in 1840. The drawing in question is linked to another group drawings which are kept in various collections and institutes and they all represent women from Nuremberg in various types of clothing that was used at the time. These drawings are dated around 1500 and they include three versions of the Woman from Nuremberg; two of them are wearing a church dress (works are preserved at the British Museum in London and Albertina in Vienna) and one woman is wearing a ball gown (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung in Basel). The artist started to take an interest in this subject around 1495 during his stay in Venice, where he drew Venetian women with typical clothing. Shortly thereafter, Dürer deepened his studies on female clothing by drawing it on paper, today in Nuremberg, where he compared the Venetian dress with that of German and from this point he focused on drawing examples of female clothing of Nuremberg. The accurate details of the drawings and the fact that the artist returned several times to this subject show that Dürer was not shy to express his simple curiosity to the fashion of his time. In fact, he wanted to document the female fashion of his native country through very precise representation of different outfits that were worn in different occasions and at different times of day, as well as the various details of every single piece of clothing. According to the criticts, the artist used his wife Agnes as a model for his drawings. The figure seems to be the same person in each drawing of this subject. The attribution of Ambrosiana’s drawing has been questioned at times but it is now confirmed based on stylistic comparisons with other works by Dürer, which have brought forth some hypothesis that this drawing might be a study for another drawing, today preserved at Albertina museum. The drawing of Milan seems sharper and more immediate than the one in Vienna which, instead, is more studied, defined and elaborated.

Dürer was a son of a goldsmith of Hungarian origins who had moved to Nuremberg. He trained in his father’s workshop where he learned to use the goldsmith tools and techniques, skills which he later used for engraving and etching.

Among the earliest known works of the artist is the self-portrait drawn with a silverpoint pen (Vienna, Albertina) when he was only thirteen years old, and although it had some errors and hesitation, it already reveals the high quality of the painter’s portrait works. Dürer continued his training at the woodcut workshop of Michael Wolgemut, where he also studied the works of Martin Schongauer, whom he greatly admired, and the famous Flemish artists Rogier Van der Weiden and Jan Van Eyck. In the 1490s’ the young Dürer started to travel to improve his skills and by 1494 he had stayed in Germany, Netherlands and Flanders.

Back in Nuremberg the artist fot married but soon he wanted to find new sources of inspiration and learning. With the excuse of plague epidemic that had broken out in Germany in 1495 he traveled to Venice and perhaps to Padua, Mantua and Pavia. Little is known of his first trip to Italy, which ended a year later. In Venice he probably studied the perspective, the works of Andrea Mantegna and those of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio which he copied in his notebooks. On his way back to Germany, Dürer visited Trento, lake Garda and Arco, where he painted the view of Arco in watercolor. When he returned to Nuremberg he dedicated himself to engraving, which was a profitable business at the time as it allowed the production of large number of prints that could be sold to artists and collectors. Once again in Nuremberg, the artist dedicated himself to engraving, which at the time was a profitable business as it allowed the production of a large quantity of prints to be sold to artists and collectors. He produced many series, among them the Apocalypse from 1496 and the Great Passion from 1497, finished in 1510.

In the meantime he also worked as a portrait painter. He painted portraits for Frederick the Wise and Oswolt Krel, such as the one with gloves from 1498 and the famous portrait with fur from 1500. He also painted works with religious themes, such as the Polyptych of Seven Sorrows, the Altar of Paumgartner from 1500 – 1504 and the Adoration of the Magi.
At the beginning of the 16th century Dürer devoted himself to the study of nature and animals and he made splendid colorful drawings of them which today are preserved at the Albertina in Vienna.

In 1505 he traveled to Italy and Venice where he focused on the studies of perspective and analyzed the works of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini as well as those of Jacopo de’ Barbari. During his stay he made several artworks, such as the Feast of the Rosary for Jacob Fugger, the Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman which was not completed and the Twelve-year Old Christ Among the Doctors.

In 1507 Durer stayed in Bologna where he deepened his studies on perspective and when he returned to Nuremberg he decided to write a treatise on proportions of the human body, on which he later based the two paintings depicting Adam and Eve, preserved today at the Prado in Madrid. In this painting the beauty of the figures is not based on the mathematical and classical proportions of Vitruvius, but on a naturalistic vision of the artist who copied the natural proportions as he saw them on the model.
After a long stay in Nuremberg, during which he painted other altarpieces and portraits working at the service of Emperor Maximilian I, in 1520 Dürer moved to Netherlands where he remained for one year. He returned to Nuremberg where he died in 1528.

Pinacoteca Ambrosiana was established in 1618 by cardinal Federico Borromeo, when he donated his art collection to the Ambrosiana library, which was founded by him as well in 1607. The building was named after the patron saint of Milan, St. Ambrose.

It was the first museum in the world to be open to the public. The history of the Pinacoteca and the library goes hand in hand, as this was also the first library to be open to the public. The book collection includes prestigious volumes, among them Petrarch’s Virgil with illuminated manuscript by Simone Martini and Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, donated in 1637 by Galeazzo Arconati.

In fact, cardinal’s plan was to display art with its symbology and evocative power to serve Christian values reaffirmed by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which were threatened by the diffusion of the Protestant reformation.

The academy was added in 1637 and transferred to Brera in 1776. It was supposed to be an artistic school of painting, sculpture and architecture which would allow the students to learn from the great models of the history.

The building was designed by architect Fabio Mangone (1587-1629) and it is located in the city center. The space is expanded over 1500 square meters and divided into twenty-two rooms. The cardinal illustrated the works and the objects himself in his book in Latin, Museum (1625), which still today represents the main nucleus of the Pinacoteca.

Through commissions and purchases Federico Borromeo’s collection grew with the paintings of Lombard and Tuscan schools, among them works by Raphael, Correggio and Bernardino Luini and casts from Leone Leoni’s workshop, arriving to a total of 3000 artworks of which 300 are exhibited.

There are great masterpieces such as the Portrait of a Musician by Leonardo Da Vinci (1480), Madonna del Padiglione by Botticelli (1495), the cartoon for the School of Athens by Raphael (before 1510), the Holy Family with St. Anne and Young St. John by Bernardino Luini (1530) and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Jacopo Bassano (1547).

A great part of the collection is dedicated to landscape and to still life, because the Cardinal saw the nature as an important tool raising the human mind into the Divine. For this reason, Federico collected Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit and the miniature paintings by Jan Brueghel and Paul Brill.

After the cardinal’s death the collection was enriched with the donations of the artworks from 15th and 16th centuries, such as the frescoes by Bramantino and Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen’s marble self-portraits. Museo Settala, one of the first museums in Italy, founded by canonical Manfredo Settala (1600-1680), was joined to Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in 1751. The museum is a sort of science history museum with a variety of curiosities of all time.

During the period of growth, the museum required some structural and architectural changes as well, including the expansion of the exhibition halls between 1928 and 1931, which were decorated with 13th century miniature motifs of Ambrosian codes, and between 1932 and 1938 a new series of restorations was implemented under the guidance of Ambrogio Annoni. The renowned readjustment in 1963 was curated by architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni and the museum excursus was concluded with the current reorganization between 1990 and 1997.