Eleonora di Toledo

Around 1560 Eleonora di Toledo was in her late thirties. She had given Cosimo de' Medici, the duke of Florence, 11 children, and she was suffering from tuberculosis. This panel is counted among the last portraits of her made in her lifetime, and it hides very little. The temples are sunken, the cheeks hollow, the skin pale against a wall of red curtain. The court costume is as rich as ever, a crimson gown banded in black and gold with pearls along the seams, a doubled string of pearls running to her waist, a white handkerchief in her gloved hand. She died in December 1562, at 40. The picture later belonged to William Beckford, the English novelist and collector, and it left his heirs at Hamilton Palace in Scotland in the great Hamilton Palace sale in London in 1882.