Holy Family with Vittoria della Rovere and Cosimo III as the Virgin and the Christ Child

Vittoria della Rovere came into the Medici family carrying a vanished duchy behind her. She was the granddaughter and heir of the last duke of Urbino, and the pictures that travelled to Florence with her inheritance included Titian's Venus of Urbino, which is a large part of why the Florentine galleries look the way they do.

This canvas was painted around 1648. She sits as the Virgin, and the small boy who is the Christ Child is her son, the future Cosimo III. The third figure is the one people argue about. The museum's own records title the composition a Holy Family with Ferdinando II, Vittoria and Cosimo III, which would make Saint Joseph her husband the grand duke. The same records note that Joseph carries the features of Giovanni Cosimo Geraldini, the head of Vittoria's household, and that such a detail can hardly have gone unnoticed, since the marriage was by then going badly.

In 1728 the last of the Medici, Anna Maria Luisa, had two copies of the picture made. One went out to a villa in the hills. The other hung in her own apartment in this palace.