Justus Sustermans

In 1621 a Flemish portraitist from Antwerp arrived in Florence to take one of the steadiest jobs a painter could hold in Europe: official portraitist to the Medici, the family that ran Tuscany. Justus Sustermans kept that post for the rest of his long life, painting grand dukes, duchesses, children and visiting royalty, and sending their likenesses out across the courts of the continent.

The picture that outlived all of them was of a man in trouble. Around 1636 Sustermans painted Galileo Galilei, the astronomer the Roman Inquisition had condemned three years earlier for arguing that the earth moves around the sun. Galileo was near 70, going blind, and confined to his villa on the hill of Arcetri outside Florence. The portrait now in the Uffizi shows a heavy, watchful old face, and it became the image the world pictures when it hears his name.

Sustermans had trained in Antwerp and Paris before Cosimo the Second called him south. He died in Florence in 1681, having served the Medici for some 60 years.