Italian, Florentine, Portrait of a Lady

We do not know the identity of the elegant young woman portrayed here, but her costume suggests a date of about 1540. She sits before a green curtain that has been gathered up into a swag on one side, and meets our eye with a direct, confident gaze. The green curtain and the woman’s appearance and headdress are very similar to Bronzino’s Portrait of a Woman and her Little Boy of about 1540, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is possible that the National Gallery’s portrait is of the same woman but slightly older – her expression is softer, with the slightest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

Her white silk dress is edged with rows of what may be pearls and has elaborate ruched puffed sleeves. Her lower sleeves are of red silk and would have been detachable from her gown, as was usual at the time. She appears to be a wealthy woman, possibly a member of the court of Cosimo I de' Medici, where Bronzino was court portraitist. She wears a simple necklace of alternating brown and gold beads with a large gold bead or clasp at the front, and a circular headdress of elaborately decorated fabric. This type of headdress is also worn by the sitter in Bronzino’s Portrait of a Lady in Green in the Royal Collection, Windsor. A similar style of headdress can be seen in another National Gallery painting, the slightly earlier A Concert by an unknown Venetian or Friulian artist.

The picture has been reduced in size and the paint has worn thin and been retouched in many places, which makes it difficult to work out who painted it. The portrait was formerly thought to be by Bronzino due to its similarity with his Portrait of a Woman with her Little Boy, or by Cristofano Allori (1577–1621), the son of Bronzino’s pupil Alessandro Allori. However, the dating of the costume to the 1540s makes it unlikely to be by Cristofano Allori, unless it is a copy of an earlier portrait.

The portrait cannot be by Bronzino as it is not painted with the very highly finished quality typical of his brushwork or with his strongly sculptural sense of form, as seen in his Allegory or The Madonna and Child with Saints; the contours and outlines here are soft and the brushwork quite loose and painterly, for example in the white dots of paint used to suggest the embroidery on the bodice – quite a different approach to the crisply delineated design of the lace collar in Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man, on loan to the National Gallery from a private collection.