Portrait of Contessina de' Medici

When the pictures at the Medici villa of Poggio Imperiale, on the hill south of Florence, were listed in an inventory of 1860, this panel was entered as a woman with her hair dressed with pearls. No name was written down. The old villa number, 556, is still there on the back of the panel, brushed on in red lead, and the gallery keeps it as the inventory mark.

The sitter has since been identified as Contessina de' Medici, a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who died in 1515. The painting came about half a century after her death, and the face in it was assembled from family memory and from other pictures. The museum's record does not pin it down further. It gives a bracket of ten years in the 1560s, no measurements at all, and for the author only the formula manner of Alessandro Allori, the portraitist of the grand ducal court.