Portrait of a Woman

The title this picture goes under in Florence calls her a Medici wet nurse, and that is a guess made in the 19th century which the gallery no longer believes. Its own record points at the clothes and the way she stands and says the sitter held an established position in society. The clothes also date the painting. A historian of dress read the cut and the fabric and put it in the first half of the 1550s, which is how the museum arrives at its date rather than from any document. She is standing three-quarter length beside the base of a pilaster, in a cap, with gloves, rings and a string of pearls. Early in the 18th century the canvas hung in the alcove chamber of Palazzo Pitti, and was moved out in the rehanging of the gallery later that century.