Home > Encyclopedia of Food & Culture > Medici, Catherine De'

MEDICI, CATHERINE DE'. Orphaned soon after her birth in Florence, Catherine de' Medici (1519–1589) inherited the wealth and theatrical style of her grandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the most notable of the Florentine family who made the name of Medici synonymous with quattrocento (Italian fifteenth-century) art and power. At age fourteen Catherine was sent to France to marry Henry of Orleans (Henry II), who inherited the French throne in 1547 at the death of his father Francis I. Catherine bore ten children. After the death of Henry II in 1559, three of Catherine's sons successively became kings of France, and Catherine served as queen regent.

The thirty-year length of her reign and the horrific religious wars of her time have given Catherine a symbolic identity that stretches historical fact. Popular myth has long named her the Italian queen mother of France's high cuisine, for she is often presumed to have imported new notions of cooking as refined as the other civilized arts reborn in the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century. But in fact Catherine's innovations were not culinary but theatric and were geared to politics rather than to gastronomy.

Regent of a weak government during the conflicts between Catholics and Huguenots that culminated in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, Catherine used spectacle to create an image of stability and order when reality denied it. In 1564 she displayed the virtual power of monarchy in a grand tour through the countryside with her son Charles IX. Throughout her regency she staged court festivals or masques that used food as the excuse for lavish theatrical happenings, which combined drama with dance, music, sculpture, and the decorative arts. In France she created a new style for royal banqueting that achieved its apotheosis in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.

See also France; Italy.

Betty Fussell