Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo and her son Garzia de' Medici

Both people in this portrait were already long dead when it was painted. Eleanor of Toledo, the Spanish-born duchess of Florence, and her young son Garzia both died of malaria in the autumn of 1562, within weeks of each other, on a journey through the marshy Tuscan countryside. This version dates from 1584, more than 20 years later. Its author, Lorenzo dello Sciorina, had trained under Bronzino, the court painter whose celebrated portrait of Eleanor set the pattern for how the Medici duchess was remembered. Sciorina reworked that famous image, keeping the duchess in her stiff, gold-threaded gown but placing Garzia at her side in place of the son Bronzino had painted. So this is a portrait made from memory and from another man's picture, a family kept alive on panel decades after the family itself was gone. The elaborate dress carries its own history, the kind of Spanish court fashion Eleanor had brought to Florence.