Portrait of a girl

In the 1540s Bronzino was court painter to Cosimo the First, the young duke running Florence, and his job was to give the Medici a face: cool, polished, unhurried, skin like enamel. This small panel is one of those court portraits, a girl of perhaps eight or nine holding a little book, the kind of prayer book that marked a well-brought-up child. Who she is has never been settled. One old idea names her Giulia de' Medici, the orphaned daughter of Duke Alessandro, who had been murdered in 1537 and whose child was taken in and raised among Cosimo's own. Others simply call her an unnamed daughter of the house. Either way she holds her book and looks out with the still, closed expression Bronzino gave nearly everyone he painted at that court.