(Florence circa 1540–1606/8?)
Portrait of Joanna of Austria, Granduchess of Tuscany (1547–1578),
oil on panel, 60.7 x 48.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Elizabeth Pilliod for suggesting the attribution on the basis of a high resolution digital photograph and for her help in cataloguing the present painting. She has proposed a date of circa 1568–1578.

Butteri was a close associate, student and assistant of the two leading Florentine portraitists of the sixteenth century, Agnolo Bronzino and Alessandro Allori.

The present portrait is closely related to a full-length portrait of Joanna of Austria by Giovanni Bizzelli (1556–1607 or 1612) in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, Inv.-Nr. GG 3243). Bizzelli was also a student and collaborator of Allori. Although the Vienna painting is larger (178 x 94 cm), it appears to show the Archduchess in the same costume, including a richly embroidered zimarra and bejeweled hat. However, comparison of the Vienna painting with this smaller portrait shows important differences. For example, the outlines of Joanna’s facial features are less pinched in the present portrait, and her eyebrows and lips are wider. In addition, the spacing between the two uppermost stings of pearls is different: the two strings are closer together and more uniformly parallel in the present portrait. Also, the edge of the collar of the ruffled, white undershirt that Joanna wears in the present portrait has a different outline from that in Bizzelli’s Vienna portrait: in the Vienna picture, the horizontal edges of the collar are almost completely flat where the two sides meet whilst the horizontal edges are articulated, with several dips and points in the present small portrait. This more natural-looking collar edge is identical to the collar in the official bust-length court image of Joanna painted by Alessandro Allori circa 1567-68 (Christie’s, New York, 14 April 2016, lot 103, oil on poplar panel, 47 x 38.1 cm). This reveals that while the artist of this work is not Bizzelli himself, whoever painted it had access to the Allori original and was not simply copying the Bizzelli picture. As a member of Allori’s bottega, Butteri would have had access to the original portrait of Joanna. In the small portrait, some of the details in the face of Joanna can be favourably compared to faces in Butteri’s work, notably the shape of the lips and eyebrows in the faces of various individuals in the Holy Family with St. Anne and Members of the Medici Family (1575, Cenacolo di Andrea del Sarto, Florence).