Scipione Pulzone Gaeta 1544 - 1598 Rome

A. Venturi, Storia dell'arte italiana, vol. IX, part 7, Milan 1934, p. 781:
F. Zeri, Pittura e Controriforma;

The witty conceit of painting a picture within a picture has been splendidly adopted by Pulzone for this portrait of a noblewoman.  The trompe l'oeil curtain draped across the upper left corner of the canvas, alludes to a convention more typical of Renaissance portraiture, in which drapery was ofter depicted as a backdrop to the sitter and it may also refer to the custom of covering paintings with curtains. The curtain folds hang very convincingly over the canvas, casting a sharp shadow across the surface, and wrapping themselves around the tacked edge of the fictive unframed canvas. The inclusion of such a realistic curtain was adopted by Pulzone in his Medici portraits intended for the Serie Aulica in Florence (1590). The identification of the sitter here as Maria de' Medici was first put forward when the painting was with Ehrich Galleries, New York, in 1920, and the identification was further confirmed by Wilhelm Suida when the painting reappeared on the market in 1944.

Maria de' Medici was born in 1573, the daughter of Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici, and later became Queen of France when she married Henri IV in 1600. In 1594, the year in which this picture was painted, Maria would have been twenty-one years old. Most single-figure portraits of Maria post-date her wedding and show the sitter almost twenty years older, for example Frans Pourbus' portrait of 1611 in the Uffizi, Florence (K. Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, Florence 1981, pp. 1242-3, no. 10, reproduced fig. 86,10). A lost portrait of Maria de' Medici by Pulzone almost certainly existed, for an inventory records a red chalk drawing of her by the artist, together with drawings of Ferdinando I and Christine of Lorraine, all of which were presumably associated with portraits in the Serie Aulica (Langedijk, op. cit., p. 1245, no. 12). The view that this portrait was probably painted by Pulzone for the Serie Aulica and that it represents Maria de' Medici was supported by Prof. Federico Zeri (written communication, 21 September 1995), but the identification of the sitter as Maria de' Medici has been rejected by Dr. Karla Langedijk.

The recent cleaning of the picture revealed Pulzone's signature inscribed on the chair and the date of 1594 (and not 1591, as had previously been thought): for the painting in its pre-cleaned state, and prior to the removal of an extension of about 6 inches along the bottom edge, see Zeri under Literature, plate 87.