Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici

On 19 April 1943 this panel left the Palatine Gallery with a convoy of pictures and went out to the Villa del Monte at Galliano, in the Mugello hills north of Florence. In February 1944 it moved again, down into the Museo degli Argenti on the ground floor of the Pitti, and it came back up to the gallery on the first day of 1946. The state record dates the painting between 1546 and 1548. The earliest of those years is fixed by the sitter, since Cosimo I de' Medici wears the collar of the Golden Fleece, conferred on him by the emperor in 1546. The panel entered the Pitti catalogue in 1859 as a Bronzino, and from Carlo Gamba onwards it has been read as a faithful replica in another hand, which is why the state catalogue files it under Bronzino's workshop. It was restored in 2012 and hangs in the Sala di Prometeo.