Portrait of Catherine de’ Medici

Around 1600 someone in Florence painted the city's most improbable success story. Caterina de' Medici was born here in 1519, into the banking family that ran Tuscany, and she left as a girl to marry into the French royal house. She became queen of France, then, widowed early, the power behind three of her sons who wore the French crown in turn. By the time this likeness was made she had been dead about eleven years. It shows her not as the young Florentine bride but as the guarded older woman in dark widow's dress that late-16th-century France knew. The Medici kept her memory close at home, the daughter who had gone north and ended up steering a kingdom through decades of religious war.