Franz Ferdinand Richter

By 1737 Gian Gastone de' Medici had spent years lying in bed in the Pitti Palace, looked after by a crowd of favourites, and the question of who would rule Tuscany after him had already been settled elsewhere. A treaty signed in Vienna in 1735 promised the grand duchy to Francis Stephen of Lorraine. That is the year on the enormous portrait in the Galleria Palatina, which shows Gian Gastone standing in ermine, the grand-ducal crown on a cushion beside him and the dome of Florence behind.

It was painted by Franz Ferdinand Richter, and it is among the last works he dated. He was born around 1693 near Breslau in Silesia, then Habsburg land and German-speaking, and he is one of the many German painters who went to Italy and stayed. The first firm record of him is a passport application in Rome on 18 May 1727, for the journey home. He was at work in Florence afterwards. He painted the violinist Francesco Maria Veracini, whose portrait was later engraved in England, an altarpiece that hangs in the village church of Aschbach in Bavaria, and a self-portrait that went into the Uffizi's collection of artists' self-portraits.

Gian Gastone died on 9 July 1737, and with him the Medici line of grand dukes ended. When Richter died, nobody wrote it down. The reference books offer 1737, or 1743, or simply a date after 1737.