Portrait of Virginia de' Medici

For a long time this was taken for a sixteenth-century likeness of a Medici princess, Virginia de' Medici, from the hand of Jacopo Ligozzi. Recent study at the Uffizi tells a different story. The small panel was in fact painted around 1660 by Mario Balassi, a Florentine who had spent his youth in Rome working for the powerful Barberini family before returning to the Medici court. And the woman shown may never have been a real sitter at all. The picture reads as an invented figure, a Queen of Armenia, one of the exotic costume portraits that Baroque collectors liked to keep in a gallery. It hung in the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, west of Florence, recorded there under an old inventory number, 64.