Bianca de’ Medici, better known by the diminutive Bia, was the eldest child of Duke Cosimo I. The child had been born in 1537, thus two years before the marriage between Cosimo and Eleonora celebrated in 1539, from an illegitimate relationship between the duke and a woman whose identity is still unknown. Welcomed into the Medici household, Bia had been raised along with the couple’s legitimate children (they had as many as eleven) with the same affection that all members of the family reserved for the little ones, first and foremost her grandmother Maria Salviati, who had a special fondness for Bia. This loving relationship was also accounted for in 1560 by Simone Fortuna, ambassador of Francesco Maria II della Rovere in Tuscany, who wrote in a letter that Duke Cosimo, during his first years in the duchy, “had from a gentlewoman of Fiorenza a little whore, who was baptized in the name of His Most Illustrious Excellency, and was called Bia. Et la Signora duchessa Leonora, finding her at home, raised her lovingly as born that she was by her husband before she was his wife.”
Behind the painting of exceptional beauty and refinement, however, lies a sad story: in fact, the painting dates back to the period between 1542 and 1545, but it is a posthumous portrait, because little Bia lost her life at the age of only five. Her father Cosimo left for Arezzo, which belonged to the Florentine possessions, taking Bia with him as well. On the return journey the latter suddenly fell ill: it was the end of January 1542 and the little girl died after a few weeks, to the despair of the whole family who had seen taken away at a tender age that little creature whom everyone loved and who was so full of life, as Bronzino himself wished to express in the Uffizi canvas, in which, as already written, the little girl seems to rise at any moment from that Dantean chair and where she plays with the golden chain between her fingers that encircles her waist.
