Portrait of Lucrezia di Cosimo

The girl in this portrait is Lucrezia de' Medici, a daughter of Duke Cosimo I of Florence, painted around 1560 as she was leaving home for Ferrara. She had been betrothed as a young teenager to Alfonso II d'Este, the Duke of Ferrara, taking the place of an older sister who died before the wedding. Within about a year of joining him she was dead at 16, most likely of tuberculosis, though rumors spread almost at once that her husband had poisoned her. Those rumors outlasted her by centuries and reached the English poet Robert Browning, who turned them into My Last Duchess in 1842, the cold speech of a duke describing the portrait of a wife he has had killed. The painting comes from Bronzino and his workshop, made for her family around the time she left.