Eleonora di Toledo

Agnolo Bronzino

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the hips up, a pale-skinned woman with a long, narrow face wears a richly decorated crimson-red dress in this vertical portrait painting. Her body angles to our left, and she looks in that direction with hooded brown eyes. She has a long nose, a pointed chin, and her pink lips are closed. Deep indentations at her temples and the hollows of her cheeks are shadowed. Her brown hair is parted down the middle and held back in a gold net. Large pearls hang from her ears, and a long strand of pearls doubled around her neck look white at her collar and gray down by her waist. The bodice of her dress is patterned with marigold orange and wine red, and translucent white lace covers her chest and flares up the sides of her neck. A heavy outer garment has black stripes decorated with gold leafy designs alternating with ruby-red stripes. The seams are studded with pearls down the front and along the split sleeves. A gray cuff lines the wrist of a bare, long-fingered hand, which rests across the other forearm. She wears a leather-brown glove on the other hand and clutches a white cloth in that fist. She sits on a pine-green cushion, and an apple-red curtain falls in gentle folds across the background.