Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond

mid 1660's

In this work, court painter Jacob Huysmans depicted Frances Stuart as Minerva, the goddess of intellect, military victory, and the arts, and a daughter of Jupiter. She sports the Roman goddess’s attributes: spear and armor, including a helmet and shield adorned with the head of Medusa. Minerva was also associated with chastity, and so the choice to represent Stuart in this guise might have been understood in the context of sexual intrigues at the seventeenth-century court of King Charles II of England. The king was infatuated with Stuart and, although he chose her as the model for Britannia, the female personification of Great Britain, she is thought not to have succumbed to his advances.