Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century French king, has been justifiably and, it seems, forever established in the popular imagination as the quintessential absolutist monarch. He dispensed favors and offices in exchange for loyalty and subservience, a policy that effectively subdued a potentially fractious and adversarial nobility. He delegated responsibilities to trusted subjects for specific tasks: military planning, public works, court functions, tax collection, security (police), and fiscal administration. These were the embryonic “ministries” of the early modern bureaucratic state. Despite these significant innovations, the Sun King’s governing framework was not his invention. A precursor, and perhaps model, was the Florentine grand-ducal state established more than a century earlier, in the 1530s, by Cosimo I(1519–74), the scion of the Medici “cadet” line, who seized power after the demise of the “senior” line. Emblematic of Cosimo’s rule is the magnificent Uffizi (“Offices”) complex, designed by Giorgio Vasari to house the state’s executive agencies. No other European principality had, at this date, developed anything so functionally articulated or erected such a grand structure suitable to contain it. Above all, Cosimo did not allow his subjects to forget where the power resided: fully—and only—in his person. The duke’s likeness was used as a propaganda tool, reproduced in countless duplicates and displayed prominently in every public venue in Tuscany. An unforgettable example is the huge bronze portrait bust by Benvenuto Cellini that greeted visitors at the entrance to last year’s Medici show at the Metropolitan. The prominent cuirass and menacing gaze leave