Portrait of Pope Clement VII

By the time this portrait was painted, around 1567, the man in it had been dead for more than 30 years. Clement the Seventh, born Giulio de' Medici, was the family's second pope, and his reign was one of the stormiest in the Church's history. In 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles the Fifth sacked Rome and held the pope prisoner, and it was Clement who refused Henry the Eighth of England the annulment he demanded, the refusal that pushed England to break with Rome. This likeness came from the workshop of Bronzino, court painter to Duke Cosimo the First, who was gathering portraits of illustrious Medici for the family. Painted a generation after Clement's death, it was worked up not from life but from earlier images of him.