Eleonora of Toledo and Her Son

Cosimo I de' Medici was ruling Florence with a ducal title less than 10 years old, and portraits of his wife and children were part of how he made it look settled. They were copied in the workshop and sent abroad as gifts. The first version of this one, painted around 1545, is in the Uffizi, and the Detroit panel was written off for a long time as a copy after it. Conservation work in the 1990s changed the picture. It showed the Detroit painting to be a deliberate workshop replication with Bronzino's own hand in it, and the museum now dates it between 1545 and 1550. The child is most likely Giovanni, Eleonora's second son, born in 1543. He and his mother both died of malaria in the closing weeks of 1562, within a month of each other.