Portrait of Margherita Lasso de Castiglia Trivulzio

Countess Margherita Lasso de Castiglia (1532-1617), of a noble Spanish family, marries Count Claudio Trivulzio, a Milanese patrician. As a widow, King Philip, in recognition of her and her husband's merits towards the crown of Spain, awarded her a lifetime allowance of 2000 scudi. She names the Ospedale Maggiore heir to 3,300 poles of land (approximately 259 hectares), which she had bought in the past from the hospital itself, and which she had already decided to leave at the institution at the time of her death. She asks to be buried, despite being secular, with the dress of the Dominican nuns, inside the internal church of the cloistered monastery of the nuns of San Lazzaro in Milan. It is in this clothing that she is portrayed by the painter Alfonso Pozzobonelli, son of the better known Giuliano.