Portrait of Isabella de' Medici

Almost everything about this panel is qualified. The gallery's own record gives the painter as Alessandro Allori with a question mark after the name. For most of the 19th century it was catalogued as a Bronzino, later as workshop, and the Allori proposal is made cautiously. The sitter has moved too. She was long called Laudomia de' Medici, another woman of the family, and was re-identified as Isabella, the daughter of Cosimo I and the most learned of his children. If it is Isabella, she is somewhere between 13 and 18 here, painted around 1555 to 1560, holding a handkerchief beside a pilaster with pearls threaded through her hair. She died at Cerreto Guidi in 1576, at 33. Her brother the Grand Duke announced that she had been taken ill while washing her hair. The Ferrarese ambassador reported that her husband had strangled her at midday.