Portrait of Joanna of Austria with her son Philip

By the time this portrait was finished in 1586, both people in it were dead. Joanna of Austria, a Habsburg archduchess, had come to Florence to marry Francesco de' Medici and become Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and she died in 1578 after years of a marriage overshadowed by her husband's mistress. The little boy at her side is her son Filippo, the long-awaited male heir who was meant to carry on the Medici line. He lived only to the age of five, dying in 1582. So this is a picture of memory rather than life, painted to hold a mother together with the son who should have secured a dynasty, at a court that had lost them both within a few years. She wears the stiff Spanish fashion of the Habsburg courts, a reminder that she never quite stopped being an archduchess from Vienna.