A Young Woman and Her Little Boy

Florence had stopped being a republic. Duke Alessandro de' Medici was assassinated in 1537, the 17-year-old Cosimo took his place, and by 1539 Bronzino was painting the decorations for Cosimo's wedding to Eleonora of Toledo and had become the portraitist of his court. This panel comes from about a year after that. The woman has never been identified, only placed, by her crimson brocade and her gold, among the families around the new duke. Her hand rests on the shoulder of a boy tucked into the lower corner. The manner is the court's as much as the painter's, cool and sealed and unhurried, which suited a regime that wanted to look permanent. The panel reached Washington through the Philadelphia collector Peter Widener, whose son gave it to the National Gallery in 1942.