Isabella de’ Medici (1552-1553)

Bronzino (1503-1572)

Isabella de’ Medici
15521553
Oil on panel 44 x 36 cm
NationalmuseumStockholm

Attributed to Bronzino

Isabella de’ Medici, the second daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora of Toledo. She was born in 1542, and in 1553, at the age of 11, she was betrothed to Paolo Giordano Orsini d’Aragona, Duke of Bracciano and Anguillara. The marriage was consummated in 1558, although she remained at the Medici court for years. She bore a daughter, Francesca Eleonora (Nora) in 1571, and a son, Virginio, in 1572, who succeeded his father as duke of Bracciano (15851615). After an affair with her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini, Isabella was murdered on the orders of her husband in 1576. The couple is depicted together with their son and other members of the Medici family representing different saints in the painting Madonna and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, attributed to Giovanni Maria Butteri, executed the year before the murdering (Uffizi Gallery, Inv. 1890, no. 3402)

Isabella is depicted as a blonde girl in her early teens. She has brown eyes and her skin is pale against a dark olive-green background, in a similar way to other portraits of the Medici children, particularly that of her brother Francesco, now in the Uffizi Gallery (inv. 1890, no. 1571). She wears earrings made of gold and pearls, in the form of cornucopias, a traditional symbol of fertility, but also alluding to her motto “FLORES FRVCTVSQUE SIMVL” (Flowering and fruits together) and to her eloquence and erudition in languages, philology and especially music. She is dressed in a wide-necked blue gown (soutane) with a gorgiera made of bobbin lace, or more plausibly in the ancient technique of sprang, recognizable by the sparse pattern. The lower part of the panel has some areas of damage, which seem to originate from a fire, and the blue texture may originally have had a different appearance. Even so, the colours are restrained, and they seem to represent decorum for an unmarried Medici princess.

The present painting is attributed to Agnolo Bronzino in the early inventories of the new Nationalmuseum and in the catalogues by Sander (1876), Göthe (1920), Sirén (1928, 1933, 1941) and Strömbom (1949). In 1932 Bernard Berenson was the first outside Sweden to acknowledge the portrait as an original by Bronzino, with a slight change later on to “Portrait of Isabella de’ Medici (st.)”, signifying a studio work.

Giorgio Vasari mentions that Bronzino painted “all the Duke’s children, some for the first time and others for the second, the Lady Maria, a very great and truly beautiful girl, the Prince Don Francesco, the Lord Don Giovanni, Don Garzía and Don Ferdinando in a number of pictures which are all in the guardaroba of His Excellency”. (Nationalmuseum)

See also:

• Medici, Isabella de’ (1542-1576)