Lorenzo dello Sciorina

In the 1570s, Francesco de' Medici, the melancholy grand duke of Tuscany, had a windowless little study built inside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence to hold his medicines, gemstones and curiosities. Giorgio Vasari, the court's painter and impresario, gathered a team of young Florentines to cover its walls, and among them was Lorenzo Vaiani, known to everyone as dello Sciorina.

He had trained under Bronzino, the great Medici portraitist, and carried that cool, polished court manner into his own work. A member of the founding generation of the Accademia del Disegno, Florence's new painters' academy, he spent his career on the large collaborative projects that filled the city's churches and palaces, so his name survives on shared commissions more than on any single famous panel.

He was born in Florence in 1541 and died there in 1598. One of his securest surviving works is a portrait of Eleanor of Toledo, the Spanish-born Medici duchess, with her young son Garzia, painted after an earlier likeness of the pair by Bronzino.