Portrait of a Woman (Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne?)

Two questions hang over this portrait, and neither has ever been fully closed. The first is who she is. For a long time she was called Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, the French noblewoman who married into the Medici family and became the mother of Catherine de' Medici, a future queen of France. That name is really a guess, which is why the label still carries a question mark. The second question is who painted her. The name attached now is the French court artist Jean Perréal, yet the older records are far more cautious. The Pitti inventories of the 1840s and 1850s give no author at all, and in 1912 the picture was catalogued instead as a work of the German painter Lucas Cranach. What everyone does agree on is smaller and surer: this is the likeness of a woman in French court dress of the early 1500s, and the costume alone places her at the French court.