Garzia de' Medici

The jewel the boy holds has often been called a rattle. It is an amulet against the evil eye, a harpy sitting on a horn with a precious stone hanging from it. Women in Naples wore that kind of charm to protect a pregnancy, so it may have come from his mother, Eleonora of Toledo, or from his grandfather, the Spanish viceroy there. In the other hand is an orange blossom, just opened. Garzia de' Medici was born in 1547 and looks two or three here, which is how the panel is dated to about 1550. He wears red silk and gold with pearl embroidery at collar and cuffs, and he is given the same distant, unmoving expression Bronzino used for the adults of the Florentine court, because what is being painted is an heir to Tuscany. The Prado lists the panel as attributed to Bronzino and as a version of a lost original, the master's own hand apparently confined to the face. Garzia died in 1562, at 15, of malaria caught in the Maremma marshes, within weeks of his brother Giovanni and his mother.