The Italian Renaissance has long been presented as a procession of male power players, from artists like Michelangelo to arts patrons like banker-statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici. But that view is set for a corrective this month, when Florence’s Uffizi Galleries mounts a comprehensive show at Pitti Palace about Eleonora di Toledo (1522–1562), the Florentine duchess who ruled the Tuscan roost for a few decades, overseeing a makeover of the city’s historic core south of the Arno that still shapes it today. Bringing together a host of splendid objects, from cameos to textiles to paintings, Eleonora di Toledo and the Invention of the Medici Court in Florence runs through May 14 in the vast palace, which Eleonora brought into the Medici orbit and then ornamented with the Boboli Gardens park just beyond. Eike Schmidt , the Uffizi director, describes Eleonora as the true “manager of the Medici court.” She acted as a consort and frequent regent for her husband, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, a descendant of Lorenzo’s.

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