Portrait of Claude of Lorraine, Duke of Guise

The panel names its sitter in painted capitals at the upper left, CLAUDE DE LORRAINE, DUC DE GUYSE, and that word duc is what dates it. Claude of Lorraine was only a count until 1528, when Francis I raised him to first Duke of Guise, so the picture cannot be earlier than that year. The museum's own bracket runs to about 1530. For much of the 19th century Florence filed the panel under the manner of Holbein. The attribution to Jean Clouet, the Netherlandish painter who served the French crown, rests on a related drawing at Chantilly and is accepted by recent scholarship. His son François Clouet, born around 1510, is far too young to have painted it. The sitter was a soldier with a reputation for fierceness and for standing on his rank, and his daughter Mary of Guise married James V of Scotland in 1538, which made him the grandfather of Mary, Queen of Scots. The panel is barely 29 by 26 centimetres and probably reached Florence in 1589 with Christine of Lorraine, who came that year to marry Ferdinando I de' Medici.