Portrait of the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere

The reason a Florentine palace is full of Venetian and Umbrian pictures is the woman in this oval. Vittoria della Rovere was nine years old in 1631, when her grandfather Francesco Maria the Second died as the last Duke of Urbino and the ducal collection passed to her. It travelled to Florence with her marriage to Ferdinando the Second de' Medici, Titians and a Raphael and Piero della Francesca's double portrait among it. Dolci painted her around 1675. She had been a widow for five years by then and wore the black of the religious congregation she protected, and the museum's own catalogue describes the likeness as inesorabile obiettivita, relentless objectivity, about her age and her heaviness. The dating is argued over. One reading puts it beside his signed self-portrait of 1674, another holds that he only came to paint her after Sustermans, her preferred portraitist, died in 1681. It entered the gallery as a gift from her son Cosimo the Third, listed in the palace inventory of about 1700.