Portrait of Laura Battiferri

Bronzino painted this in Medici Florence around 1552, when he was court painter to Duke Cosimo the First and moved among the city's writers as much as its rulers. His sitter is the poet Laura Battiferri, a friend, and he built the portrait around a private joke between them. She holds an open book of Petrarch's sonnets, her long fingers marking two of them — poems written to a woman also named Laura, so that the living poet and Petrarch's beloved fold into one. Bronzino gives her a sharp profile and a cool, guarded reserve, the hard elegant surface he brought to every Medici face he painted.