Valois Tapestries

The Valois Tapestries are a series of eight tapestries depicting festivities or "magnificences" at the Court of France in the second half of the 16th century. The tapestries were worked in the Spanish Netherlands, probably in Brussels or Antwerp, shortly after 1580.

Scholars have not firmly established who commissioned the tapestries or for whom they were intended. It is likely that they were once owned by Catherine de' Medici, but they are not included in the inventory of possessions drawn up after her death. She had probably presented them to her granddaughter Christina of Lorraine, for her marriage to Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1589. The tapestries are now stored at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Tuscany, but are not on public display.

The tapestries are based on six (possibly eight) designs drawn by the artist Antoine Caron during the reign of King Charles IX of France (1560–1574). These were modified by a second artist, who reveals a strong personality of his own, to include groups of full-length figures in the foreground. Historian Frances Yates believed that this second artist was the influential Lucas de Heere.

The Protestant de Heere, who died in 1584, had previously designed tapestries for Catherine de' Medici in France. In his last years, he was working in Flanders for William the Silent, the founder of the House of Orange-Nassau and the ally of Catherine de' Medici's youngest son François, Duke of Anjou. In 1582, de Heere designed the decorations for Anjou's Joyous Entry into Ghent, de Heere's home town. Between 1582, when Anjou was installed as the duke of Brabant, and his death in 1584, when he still held the town of Cambrai, the French prince opposed the forces of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, governor of the Spanish Netherlands. He met with little success, however, owing to a desperate shortage of funds to pay his troops. Art historian Roy Strong has questioned Yates's finding that the tapestries were produced in Antwerp under Lucas de Heere, suggesting that they contain Brussels markings.

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