Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo

Eleanor of Toledo arrived in Florence in 1539 as the Spanish bride of Duke Cosimo I, and she changed the city she married into. It was Eleanor who bought the Pitti Palace across the river, the great house that would become the Medici seat and later hold the gardens named Boboli. She brought Spanish court manners and a large fortune, bore Cosimo many children, and sat for one of Bronzino's most famous portraits, sheathed in a stiff brocade gown. She died in 1562, still in her forties, of malaria caught on a journey through the marshy south, along with two of her sons.