Carlo Sacconi

In 1728 the Electress Palatine, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, ordered two copies of an old court picture from a Florentine painter named Carlo Sacconi. The original, by Justus Sustermans, the Flemish painter who worked for the Medici for half a century, showed her grandmother Vittoria della Rovere and her father Cosimo III arranged as the Virgin and the Christ Child, with a Saint Joseph carrying the features of Vittoria's chamberlain. In the copies that Joseph became Ferdinando II, Vittoria's husband. One went to the Villa della Quiete outside Florence, the other into the Electress's own apartment at Palazzo Pitti, a room hung with violet damask where an inventory still records it in 1761.

Copying filled most of Sacconi's working life, on a scale that is easy to underrate. Between 1719 and 1733 he supplied the grand-ducal gallery with 159 portraits of illustrious men, continuing a series begun for Cosimo I in the 16th century, and between 1721 and 1727 he painted a second set for the corridors of the Uffizi. He was an academician of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence.

Catalogue records still describe him as documented before 1697 and after 1747, a bracket taken from the surviving paperwork. The monograph devoted to him gives the life itself, 1676 to 1762.