Palatine Gallery

This guide to the Palatine Gallery in Florence opens in the Pitti Palace's silent rooms in seventeen thirty-seven, where Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, the family's last surviving member, sat receiving guests under a black canopy while foreign courts eyed her family's treasures. It follows how those paintings, Titians and Raphaels among them, first arrived by marriage rather than conquest, and how Grand Duke Leopold the Second later turned these private staterooms into a public gallery in eighteen twenty-eight. Look up as you walk through: the ceilings were painted by Pietro da Cortona for a Medici duke in the sixteen forties.