Portrait of an Elderly Lady

Around 1540 Bronzino took up the post that defined the rest of his career, court painter to Cosimo the First de' Medici, who had seized Florence four years earlier at the age of 17 and needed a painter who could make a new regime look settled and old. This portrait comes out of those years. The sitter wears the black dress of a widow and holds a prayer book open at a line you can read, Deus misereatur, the opening of Psalm 67, God be merciful unto us. Who she is has never been settled. She was identified in 1960 as Maria Salviati, Cosimo's mother, though the woman here looks older than Maria was when she died at 46, and the sleeves and jewellery sit oddly with a widow known for dressing plainly. It reached San Francisco in 1961 as a gift from Samuel Kress, the American chain-store owner who had bought it in 1929 out of a Naples collection.