
Portrait of Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino
Details
The story
This is the same young man, Francesco Maria II della Rovere, painted in 1572. He would succeed his father two years later and rule Urbino for the rest of a long life, and he turned out to be the last of his family to hold the duchy. When he died in 1631 with no surviving male heir, Urbino passed to the Papal States. His granddaughter Vittoria della Rovere carried what remained of the family's art into another house when she married Ferdinando II de' Medici of Florence. That inheritance is how a whole group of Barocci's paintings, this portrait among them, entered the Medici collection and eventually the Uffizi.




