Portrait of a Lady

Around 1550 Bronzino had been court painter in Florence for about a decade, working for Duke Cosimo I, and the city's banking families wanted portraits in the same cool, exacting manner. This lady sits in a wooden armchair, her body turned aside and her face brought round to us. For two centuries she was assumed to be Eleonora of Toledo, Cosimo's Spanish-born duchess. Most scholars now read her as Cassandra Cavalcanti, married into the Bandini family, silk merchants with business in Lyon. The painting reached Turin in 1824, when the House of Savoy bought the Durazzo collection in Genoa along with the palace that held it, and through the 19th century it was argued over as a Pontormo until Roberto Longhi settled it back on Bronzino in 1927.