Portrait of Duchess Livia Orsini

Around 1600 the Medici were filling a new villa at Artimino, in the hills west of Florence, with portraits of noblewomen. Payments run through 1601 and again from 1603 to 1606, and the main group came to 44 pictures. The state file thinks this canvas probably belongs to that set. It names no painter, only a Florentine hand, and the sitter is named on the picture itself, in old capitals brushed across the front: Duchess Livia Orsini Cesarini. She was Roman, married into the Cesarini dukes of Civitanova, and a Florentine villa was collecting her face along with dozens of others. Her son Virginio, born in 1595, joined the Roman academy of the Lincei, and in 1623 Galileo published his argument about comets as a letter addressed to him. Virginio died the following spring, aged 28.