Portrait of Contessina de' Bardi

The woman here died in 1473. The canvas was painted around 1555 to 1565, roughly 90 years later, and no likeness of her made from life is known. The face was worked up to fill a gap in a family's gallery of ancestors.

Contessina came from the Bardi, Florentine bankers whose company had collapsed in the 1340s after the English crown stopped paying what it owed. Her marriage to Cosimo de' Medici, around 1415, attached that older name to a family still on its way up. She outlived him by nine years, ran the household throughout, and raised his illegitimate son Carlo alongside her own two boys.

The state catalogue does not commit to the painter. It records Cristofano dell'Altissimo as attributed, and the reasoning is a family likeness to the other women's portraits in the same series rather than any document.