This Week in La Gazette Drouot : Bianca Cappello, a Woman of Power, Her Portrait by Alessandro Allori

In the Cardinal’s chamber at the Villa Medici, Ferdinand—who had not yet renounced the cardinal’s purple—had the horoscope painted on the ceiling that an old woman had drawn up at his birth and that had so alarmed his father, CosimoI.

The stars foretold that, despite the existence of an older brother and the sons that brother would father, the newborn would one day be called upon to reign over Tuscany. The prophecy, however, made no mention of Bianca Cappello, whose role was nonetheless decisive in its fulfillment.
  

A Heroine of Alexandre Dumas

There are many portraits of Bianca Cappello. Perhaps the most poignant is the one Alexandre Dumas sketched in *A Year in Florence*. He depicts her atthe age of 15 or16, “with a pale, matte complexion, over which, at the slightest emotion, the blood would rush like a rosy cloud; with hair of that powerful blond hue that Raphael had just made into a beauty, with black eyes full of fire, with a supple and flexible waist, but of that sort of suppleness and flexibility that one senses is full of strength, ready for love like Juliet, and who was waiting only for the moment when some handsome Romeo would cross her path to say, like the young girl from Verona: “I shall be yours or the grave’s.”

The beautiful Venetian woman, born into a patrician family, eloped with Pietro Bonaventuri, a young man of modest means in the service of the Salviati family, whom she married after a long-kept-secret romance. Her encounter with FrancescoI de’ Medici was then as romantic as Alexandre Dumas could have wished. While Bianca reigned over the prince’s heart, his lawful wife faded into the shadows: “Poor Jeanne of Austria, for her part, was not happy: she was Grand Duchess in name, but Bianca Cappello was Grand Duchess in reality.” ” After the death of Jeanne of Austria, Bianca became Grand Duchess in title.