Maria de' Medici (1540–1557)

[2] According to one unreliable legend, recounted in Edgcumbe Staley's The Tragedies of the Medici, Maria was lovely and kept closely guarded from men, but managed to meet a young lover, Malatesta de' Malatesti, in secret.

Cosimo then supposedly put out the story that she had died of a spotted fever and threw her young lover in prison.

[4] Maike Vogt-Lüerssen argued in an article in Medicea – Rivista interdisciplinare di studi medicei that portraits of Maria have been misidentified by art historians during the past 500 years.

She argued that a portrait by Bronzino that is usually identified as Maria depicts her younger half-sister Virginia de' Medici, while a Bronzino portrait of a young girl in a white dress depicts Maria rather than her older half-sister, Bia de' Medici.

Vogt-Lüerssen also argued that a Bronzino portrait identified as an unknown noblewoman and her son is of a teenaged Maria and her younger brother, Antonio, both of whom died young.