Portrait of Pauline Bonaparte

In 1810 Tuscany was being run by Elisa Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister, as its Grand Duchess, and she brought the Swiss enamel painter Salomon-Guillaume Counis to Florence to be her court miniaturist. This is his portrait of another of Napoleon's sisters, Pauline, by then Princess Borghese in Rome. It is enamel on copper and astonishingly small, only about four centimeters, a jewel-object meant to be held rather than hung. Counis worked it up from a full-size painting of Pauline by the French portraitist Robert Lefevre. Enamel like this was fired in a kiln, so every color had to survive the heat, which is why good enamellists were rare and highly paid. It sits now in the Uffizi among the gallery's holdings of these tiny painted portraits.