Portrait of a Woman (c. 1550): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Woman (c. 1550) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Agnolo Bronzino (Italian, 1503–1572).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Bronzino was court painter to Cosimo I de’Medici, the Duke of Florence. Though the woman cannot be definitively identified, she was likely affiliated with the Medici court. As in most of the portraits in this gallery, Bronzino emphasizes wealth, status, and courtly refinement above personality or individualized expression. The plain background further accentuates the work’s monumentality and grandeur, despite its small scale. The hand placed against the chest with elegantly spread fingers extends back to an ancient Greek pose of modesty, here emphasizing the proper comportment of a woman of high status. The sitter wears a linen partlet (collar) delicately embroidered in matt stitch, part of which is, like her cuffs, trimmed in fine lace.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman
• Date: c. 1550
• Creator attribution: Agnolo Bronzino (Italian, 1503–1572)
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 81.6 x 68.5 x 6.7 cm (32 1/8 x 26 15/16 x 2 5/8 in.); Unframed: 60 x 48.8 cm (23 5/8 x 19 3/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1972.121

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “The Year in Review for 1973.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (February 1974): 31–78.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.