Portrait of Margherita Gonzaga, Princess of Mantua

Along the balustrade at the right of this canvas the painter left his name in painted capitals, saying in Latin that Franciscus Pourbus the Younger of Antwerp made it, at Mantua, in 1605. The girl in the gold-figured silk is Margherita Gonzaga, 14 years old, daughter of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and of Eleonora de' Medici. On 26 April 1606, the year after the date on the balustrade, she was married at Nancy to Henri, the heir to Lorraine. A full-length like this one, nearly two metres of it, was part of how such a marriage got made. Painted faces travelled between the courts of Europe ahead of the brides, and the Palatine Gallery has a whole cluster of these relatives hanging in it, Margherita's mother, her aunt Marie who became queen of France, and Marie's children. She stayed in Lorraine and died at Nancy in 1632.