Jacopo Ligozzi

In the Hall of Apollo at Palazzo Pitti hangs a small canvas of a swaddled baby, Leopoldo de' Medici, painted in 1618. For a long time the gallery gave it to Tiberio Titi, a portraitist who worked for the grand dukes, and the old inventory sheet still carries his name. The museum has since changed its mind in public. Its current text says the picture is by Jacopo Ligozzi, and points out that Florentine inventories from 1637 onwards had been saying so all along.

Ligozzi was born in Verona, then a city of the Venetian Republic, probably in 1547. A census of 1555 lists him as eight years old, which is where the date comes from. His father, Giovanni Ermanno, was a painter and an embroiderer, and the family trade in silk and thread stayed with him. On the first day of 1577 he left for Florence to work for Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici, on 25 ducats a month with a house and a servant.

Much of what he did there was natural history. He painted plants, birds and animals from specimens in the Medici gardens and menagerie, on sheets so exact that botanists have used them as evidence ever since. Hundreds are still in the Uffizi's collection of drawings. He stayed 50 years and served four grand dukes in turn, and when he died he was buried on 26 March 1627 in the church of San Marco in Florence.