Eleonora di Toledo

Eleonora de Toledo, wife of the powerful Duke Cosimo I de Medici of Florence, was the most influential woman in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, and this portrait honours her as the pivot of the Medici court. Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to the Medici for four decades, here depicts the duchess about 1560, in her jewels and a great fur-trimmed gown, with the cool, polished forms and aristocratic detachment for which he is celebrated. The picture belongs to a small group of portraits through which Bronzino defined the grave magnificence of Mannerist court portraiture.