The King's Favorites

This fascinating painting, the Triple Profile Portrait (ca. 1570), is something of a mystery. The figures are generally held to be men in drag, but beyond that everything about it is disputed. The painting belongs to the Milwaukee Art Museum, and their web site identifies it as the work of Flemish painter Lucas de Heere (ca. 1534–ca. 1584). They add:

This stunning and unusual portrait is not as it appears. The figures outfitted in fashionable costume are men-not women. Adding to the painting's intrigue, scholars have only recently attributed the work to Lucas de Heere, a Netherlandish painter who worked in Paris and at Fontainebleau between 1559 and 1561, and in London after 1567. Research suggests that the sitters may, in fact, be the minions (or boyfriends) of French King Henry III (1551-1589).

Down below that text is this lovely disclaimer:

This information is subject to change as the result of ongoing research.

Which I am thinking of appending to all of my posts from now on.

As for Henri III, his sexuality seems to be the subject of much debate. Selections from the Wikipedia article:

He was his mother's favourite; she called him chers yeux ("Precious Eyes") and lavished fondness and affection upon him for most of his life. . . .

Unlike his father and elder brothers, he had little interest in the traditional Valois pastimes of hunting and physical exercise. Although he was both fond of fencing and skilled in it, he preferred to indulge his tastes for the arts and reading. These predilections were attributed to his Italian mother. . . .

Reports that Henry engaged in same sex relations with his court favourites, known as the mignons, date back to his own time. Certainly he enjoyed intense relationships with them. The scholar Louis Crompton provides substantial contemporary evidence of Henry III's homosexuality, and the resulting problems at court and politics. Some modern historians dispute this. Jean-Francois Solnon, Nicolas Le Roux, and Jacqueline Boucher have noted that Henry had many famous mistresses, that he was well known for his taste in beautiful women, and that no male sex partners have been identified. They have concluded that the idea he was homosexual was promoted by his political opponents (both Protestant and Catholic) who used his dislike of war and hunting to depict him as effeminate and undermine his reputation with the French people. Certainly his religious enemies plumbed the depths of personal abuse in attributing vices to him, topping the mixture with accusations of what they regarded as the ultimate devilish vice, homosexuality. And the portrait of a self-indulgent sodomite, incapable of fathering an heir to the thone, proved useful in efforts by the Catholic League to secure the succession for Cardinal Charles de Bourbon after 1585. However, most recently, Gary Ferguson has offered a detailed assessment of Henry III and his court in the context of a discussion of the question of homosexuality in the French Renaissance, and found their interpretations unconvincing. "It is difficult," he writes, "to reconcile the king whose use of favourites is so logically strategic with the man who goes to pieces when one of them dies." 

French wikipedia has a longer article which makes much of Henri's mysteriously contradictory reputation. Sa personnalité est complexe, it says. It includes a whole section on Henri's mistresses, for whom he had une passion démesurée. Like the English version it notes that the accounts of Henri cavorting with young men came from his enemies, especially the Catholic League. Certainly Henri seems to have loved dancing and been very keen on beauty, style, and grace -- Henri III est un homme élégant qui incarne la grâce et la majesté d'un roi -- but the same could be said of macho rulers like Louis XIV. Given the Renaissance fascination with symbolic games, double meanings, elitist inside jokes, and so on I have no trouble seeing the king or someone in his circle commissioning such a painting, whether he was having sex with these men or not. Henri sounds like an interesting man; pity his reign is mostly remembered for his failure to produce an heir and the outbreak of civil war between Catholics and Protestants.