Portrait of a Woman

Small panels like this one circulated at the Medici court without names attached, and the names arrived later. This woman has had two. Earlier scholarship called her Bianca Cappello, the Venetian who ran away to Florence and ended as Grand Duchess. Comparison with other portraits then moved opinion toward Isabella de' Medici, Cosimo I's daughter. The museum records both readings and settles on neither. What is certain is the costume: silk with a raised collar, a pearl pendant, pearl earrings, pearls worked into the hair, a veil. The panel is 44 centimetres high, made to be looked at close up rather than across a room, and the catalogue dates it only loosely, to the third quarter of the 16th century. Being small, it travelled in wartime, sent out to a villa in the country in 1943, moved again in 1944, and brought back afterwards.