THE VAULTED ROOM
The Moda a Firenze has included a small miniature painting, where an audience in the Palazzo Vecchio is depicted. It shows Cosimo I de' Medici and Eleonora di Toledo seated, and either Maria or Isabella standing in front of them, greeting visitors. They're shown in a room with a vaulted ceiling, and I read somewhere that the only room with such vaulted ceilings in the palace was Eleonora's private apartment.
I have compared the miniature to pictures of that vaulted room, but some things doesn't make sense...
1. I think the picture from the palace (above) shows the only possible angle of which the miniature must have been painted. From this angle you have windows to the left. To the left in the painting is what seems to be a fireplace. But might it be a door opening? Cause it looks very tall, and there WAS a door opening, into a private study chamber, when I was there. Then it would match the miniature rather well, except...
2. If the person in front of them is showing one of their elder daughters, it must depict an episode after 1550. Maria was born in 1540, Isabella in 1542. The miniature shows a girl which must be minimum 10 years old, probably 15 or older. But Bronzino's private chapel for Eleonora was long since finished by then (he started on it in 1540). There is a sort of "door opening" with a Madonna painting above in the miniature, which COULD be compared to d´today's opening into the chapel, but then there is the bed. There is no way they could squeeze in a curtained bed in the corner between the wall window and the chapel door.
3. Of course there are the "grotesque" roof frescoes as well, but they could have been added at a later state. I honestly don't know when they're from. The perspective/relation between room and people also seems off, but THAT'S something to be expected...
Painted fiction? Or do her apartment have more such vaulted rooms? I only remember than one, but we didn't have much time when we ran through that part of the palace. I might have missed it.