Portrait of a Gentlewoman

This panel is inventoried with the furnishings of a country house. Its number, 22, belongs to the oggetti d'arte of the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, west of Florence, and even the carved Tuscan frame around it is catalogued as a work in its own right. The state file puts the painting at about 1560 to 1570 and gives it to the workshop of Alessandro Allori, who supplied the Florentine court with portraits for decades. The woman has no agreed name. Karla Langedijk, who catalogued Medici portraiture, read her as Eleonora di Toledo, the Spanish-born duchess of Florence, in a variant of a composition the workshop repeated. The museum's own title stays at a gentlewoman. On the back of the panel a hand has brushed P. 96 in black, and struck it through.