Workshop of Bronzino

Duke Cosimo I de' Medici sent his own face abroad. Portraits of himself, of his wife Eleonora and of their children went out to other courts as gifts, in versions and repetitions, and the shop that supplied them belonged to his court painter, Bronzino.

A Florentine bottega was a household before it was a business. Bronzino had entered the shop of the painter Pontormo as a teenager and stayed attached to him for years. He in turn took in Alessandro Allori at the age of five, when the boy's father died in 1540, brought him up, trained him, and died in his house in 1572. Around them worked assistants doing what such a shop existed for, repeating the master's compositions closely enough that a client got what he had ordered.

One portrait under this heading hangs in the Sala di Prometeo at Palazzo Pitti. Cosimo wears the collar of the Golden Fleece, conferred on him in 1546, so the panel cannot be earlier than that. It entered the Pitti catalogue in 1859 as an autograph Bronzino and was later read as a faithful replica out of the shop. The state record files it under Bronzino with the word bottega, which is a different entry from scuola, the looser term the same catalogue uses for painters merely formed in his manner. At Pitti the two land on two different pictures. A smaller version of this same portrait is in the Uffizi, 74 by 58 centimetres, painted before the Fleece and without it.