Portrayed in a three-quarter-length bust, Margaret Gonzaga of Lorraine is still a princess of the house of Gonzaga when Frans Pourbus the younger portrays her in this intense pre-nuptial portrait. The painting dates in the autumn of 1605, after Henry IV had informed Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in September of that year of his definitive acceptance of the marriage proposal. The portrait follows the full-length one (Florence, Palatine Gallery, signed 1605) placed in the exhibition Gallery in the Ducal Palace in Mantua. The one we referred to, however, concentrates more on the appearance of the effigy, rendered more graceful in the proportions of the face: she wears a Spanish-style dress with oversleeve on a blue background and gilded bands, on the field of which one can clearly recognise the embroidery that refers to the Gonzaga feat of the trunk, also used in another dress by her sister Eleonora in 1622 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). Margherita also wears her mother Eleonora's ring and bracelet, which can be clearly seen in the portrait now in the Uffizi, a double pearl necklace that she weaves between her fingers, indicating her name (margarita is Latin for pearl), described in the inventory of the jewellery of the Gonzaga house of 1626/27, and two star-shaped diamond brooches with a central bezel and pearls that Margaret took with her when she married Henry Vaudèmont, Duke of Bar and heir to the throne of the Duchy of Lorraine the following year (see the inventory of jewellery of 3 July 1606).