Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

What do you do when you miss someone?

You might call or text them. FaceTime them, maybe. You might look back on old videos and photographs to remember your time with them. And you might, by instinct, form a mental picture of their expressions and mannerisms and the little things they would do, sensing their presence in the process.

The Renaissance analog to modern digital methods of remembrance was the portrait. I’d like to share with you one that, through years of poring over 16th-century portraiture, has stayed with me unshakably.

This particular portrait shows a seated child considering us with her gaze, her left hand grazing the armrest, her right hand playing with a gold chain. She wears an exquisite white satin bodice. A white pearl necklace graces her neck; shimmery white earrings dangle underneath her braids. White, “bianca” in Italian, alludes to her name. She goes by “Bia” for short. 

To unlock a Renaissance portrait is a thrilling but thorny task. These works are fraught with questions of attribution and uncertainty surrounding the identity of their sitters; resolving these issues takes a combination of connoisseurial acumen, archival investigation and genealogical detective work.

But when the sitter has a prestigious lineage, portraitists often offer clues, as the Florentine painter Bronzino (1503–1572) does here. Look at the medallion on the gold chain Bia wears around her neck. By comparison, we know this to be a profile portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence — Bia’s father. 

In fact, to simplify an enormously tangled family history, Cosimo fathered Bia out of wedlock as a teenager. By all accounts, though, she was a favorite in the household. 

I see Bronzino’s likeness as striking a balance between austerity and tenderness. He frames Bia’s head with a halo-like glow in a field of sapphire blue, perhaps alluding to her purity while lending a touch of animation. He restrains his palette to white, gold and blue with a dash of red, but his sensitivity to texture — the elaborate, fashionable puffs on her shoulders; the interplay of light and shadow on her lower sleeves — makes the fabrics in the work feel tangible. 

But the story is complicated by the record that in early 1542, both Bia and her half-sister Giulia fell acutely ill. An anxious Cosimo was reported to have received updates on his daughter’s condition every day. While Giulia recovered, the younger Bia was not so fortunate, tragically succumbing to her fever. She was only five years old.

It’s likely that Cosimo, devastated and mourning, commissioned the portrait to memorialize his late daughter. 

So in fact, we’re looking here at a memorial portrait — and, very probably, a posthumous portrait done from a plaster funeral mask of the young girl.

Now look again at Bronzino’s picture. Let your eyes settle on Bia’s gentle gaze, the flush in her cheeks — then let them drift outward, meeting the faint ring of light that frames her head before reaching the surrounding ocean of rich, regal blue. This is an achingly intimate portrait. It carries with it the warmth of love and weight of grief.

We know that more generally, Renaissance portraits for domestic settings sometimes served as stand-ins for the subject in their physical absence. Raphael’s representation of the High Renaissance courtier Baldassare Castiglione (reproduced below), for example, may have functioned in this way when he was far from family on diplomatic business. 

In this way, pictorial realism embodies and conjures a person’s presence, and Bronzino’s “Bia de’ Medici” is a most poignant example of this. It enshrines in moving and meticulous detail the presence of a beloved child taken far too soon.

Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Bronzino and biographer of Renaissance artists, once described painting as the imitation of the natural world. 

Yet in this portrait, Bronzino accomplishes what nature could not: he immortalizes sweet Bia in paint.