Portrait of Maria de' Medici

On 5 October 1600 Maria de' Medici was married in Florence cathedral to Henri IV of France, who was not in the building. A proxy stood in for the king at the altar, and she would not set eyes on her husband until December. This portrait was made in the weeks just before that ceremony. The jewels she wears came out of her dowry, among them a heavy jewelled collar worn round the waist as a belt. A recent restoration separated the hand of Santi di Tito, limited to the face and perhaps the pink silk curtain behind her, from the workshop that painted everything else, which was ordinary practice in his last years. His son Tiberio was one of those hands. The picture then became the pattern for her likeness, and a number of copies of it are known.