23

pursuing the possibilities of living outside the social conventions of the time.

Bianca made deliberate use of the portrait that then as now was the favoured

vehicle for promoting one’s own image. The success of Bianca’s project is demonstrated

 by her entrance into the archduke of Tyrol’s gallery of famous people.

Here she is immortalised in two portraits, probably painted between 1587 and

1589 and placed among the group of the Medici family. The first reproduces

Pulzone’s prototype

(fig.

7) as the original has come down to us. The second

shows Bianca in profile with the grand ducal

crown51

(fig.

8). The entrance of the

small copy into the Habsburg collections among the illustrious figures thus

preceded by about 65 years that of the original by Pulzone.

1

The painting is normally exhibited in the portrait gallery at Ambras Castle. Thanks to Veronika
Sandbichler, who after the monographic exhibition in Gaeta (2013) allowed Bianca Cappello’s stay
in Vienna to be extended.
2

Margot Rauch, Großherzogin Bianca Cappello, in: exh. cat. Nozze italiane. Österreichische Erzherzoginnen
 im Italien des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Sabine Haag, pp. 158-159, Vienna 2010; Francesca
Del Torre Scheuch, Ritratto di Bianca Cappello, in: exh. cat. Scipione Pulzone. Da Gaeta a Roma
alle corti europee, pp. 325-326, ed. Alessandra Acconci and Alessandro Zuccari, Rome 2013,
pp. 325-326.
3

Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diuerse parti del mondo libri due, fatti da Cesare
 Vecellio, & con discorsi da lui dichiarati, Venice, Damian Zenaro, 1590.
4

Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage de Michel de Montaigne en Italie, par la Suisse et l’Allemagne
 en 1580 et 1581, Città di Castello 1889, p. 174; Luciano Berti, Il principe dello Studiolo.
Francesco I dei Medici e la fine del Rinascimento fiorentino, Florence 1967, p. 29.
5

»Act boldly, and it will happen«. According to Giovanni Scarabello, Venezia. Tre figlie della Repubblica,
 Venice 2013, p. 21, Bianca herself chose this motto.
6

 The bibliography on Bianca Cappello is endless. As early as 1609 Celio Malespini told her story in
his Ducento novelle. At the end of the

18th

century biographies were published by Sanseverino,

Fig. 7: After Scipione Pulzone, Bianca
Cappello, Vienna, KHM, inv.no. GG 4916

Fig. 8: Unknown painter, Bianca Cappello, Vienna,
KHM, inv.no. GG 4917