Портрет Кристины Лотарингской

By the time Valore Casini painted this portrait, around 1650, its sitter had been dead for more than a decade. Christine of Lorraine, granddaughter of Catherine de' Medici, had come from the French court to Florence in 1589 to marry Grand Duke Ferdinando I, and she remained a power in Tuscany long after his death, serving as regent for her young grandson. Casini and his brother were the Medici's regular portraitists, and pictures like this were made for the family's galleries, to keep the dynasty's faces on record rather than to catch a living likeness. That accounts for its formal, almost heraldic stillness. Her sharpest claim on history sits outside the frame. In 1615 Galileo addressed one of his most famous texts to her, the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, arguing that the new Copernican astronomy and the words of scripture need not contradict each other.