Anton Domenico Gabbiani

In the 1680s the heir to Tuscany, Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, cared about almost nothing so much as music. He built a theatre at his villa near Florence, kept a household of singers and instrumentalists, and had composers write pieces just for his rooms. The painter he trusted to record that world was Anton Domenico Gabbiani.

A Florentine trained partly in Rome under Ciro Ferri, a leading Baroque decorator, Gabbiani came home in 1680 and spent the rest of his life working for the Medici court. For Ferdinando he painted a set of canvases of the prince's musicians, grouped with their instruments, several of which survive today in the Florence Conservatory. One of those group portraits, showing three of the court's players together, is the picture people now know him by.

Alongside the portraits he filled Florentine palaces and villas with frescoes of religious and mythological scenes, the ordinary bread of a court painter. He died in Florence in 1726, past 70, having outlived the patron whose musical household he had spent his best years painting.