School of Bronzino

Italy's national catalogue keeps a fixed list of words for a picture whose author cannot be named outright: attribuito, bottega, cerchia e aiuti, maniera, officina, scuola. A cataloguer picks one of them, and each makes a separate record. Scuola is the widest. It places a painting inside a master's manner and his city without claiming that the painter ever worked under him, and it is a different entry from bottega, the shop itself.

Bronzino, who died in Florence in 1572, was the Medici court portraitist, and for a generation his way of making a face, enamel-smooth and cool and hard at the edges, was simply what a Florentine portrait looked like. Painters went on working in that manner after he was gone. Some had trained in his shop, others only near it, and a great many of their names are lost.

A picture at Palazzo Pitti brings the heading into this catalogue. It is a small panel, 43 by 35 centimetres, of a woman in dark clothing, filed by the state under Bronzino with the word scuola beside it and dated on style alone to the second half of the 16th century. The museum's older record offers a name for her, Contessina de' Medici, and puts a question mark after that too. The panel left the Uffizi in 1914, spent decades in a Pitti attic store and then in the Vasari Corridor, and reached the Galleria Palatina only in April 1993.