Portrait of Duchess Magdalene of Bavaria (1587–1628) and her son Philip William

Mother and small son were painted around 1620, in the opening years of the Thirty Years' War that would grind across the German lands until 1648. She is Magdalene, a daughter of the Duke of Bavaria. The boy is Philip William, born in 1615, who would grow up to become Elector Palatine. Their family sat close to the confessional quarrel driving the war. To marry Magdalene, a devout Catholic of the Bavarian Wittelsbach house, her husband Wolfgang William had converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism a few years earlier, swinging his small Rhineland state into the Catholic camp. The child's stiff lace collar and the mother's dark court dress belong to that world of careful dynastic display. The portrait later entered the grand-ducal collections in Florence.