Portrait of Elizabeth I of England

By the middle of the 1590s Elizabeth was past 60, and what her face looked like in public had become a matter of state. In 1596 the Privy Council ordered officers to help the Queen's Serjeant Painter track down portraits that caused her great offence, have them defaced, and allow new ones only from approved patterns. This canvas belongs to those years and to that system. It comes from the circle of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, the Flemish painter working in London whose 1592 portrait of the queen at Ditchley was copied again and again by other hands, with her features softened each time. How it reached Florence is not documented, though the museum reckons it likely came while she was still alive, through the exchange of portraits that courts kept up with one another. It was not the only one here. Florentine inventories of 1587 and 1609 record a second portrait of Elizabeth in the Palazzo Vecchio, and that one is now in Siena.