Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (yesterday's hero) embarked on a series of etchings in the 1640s, each involving an imaginary character adorned with exotic headgear. Possibly this series represents an Italian response to the example set by Rembrandt, the greatest of all printmakers and Castiglione's exact 17th-century contemporary.
The series was vast, with many more images than the samples chosen here. Yet of all those I could locate, only one (below) represented a female subject.
