Niccolò Cassana

Venice in 1691 was where you went if you wanted to buy pictures, and the heir to Tuscany was there doing exactly that. Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici met a Venetian portraitist of 32 named Niccolò Cassana, and from then on Cassana worked for him twice over, painting the Medici household and finding him things to buy. What hangs in the Palatine Gallery today owes a good deal to the Grand Prince's collecting, done through agents of that kind.

Cassana had learned the trade from his father Giovanni Francesco, a Genoese painter settled in Venice, and joined the Venetian painters' guild in 1684. For Ferdinando he portrayed the court, including in 1707 Angiola Biondi, a woman in the service of the Grand Prince's wife, Violante Beatrice of Bavaria. His judgement was trusted well beyond his own brush. In 1711 he was called in alongside Sebastiano Ricci, then the busiest painter in Venice, to value the Duke of Mantua's pictures.

Then England. Queen Anne sat to him, and he died in London with her portrait unfinished, in a year the sources give as 1713 or 1714. Ferdinando died in 1713 as well, at 50, and the inventory taken of the Grand Prince's collection runs through picture after picture by Cassana. His portrait of Ferdinando hangs in the Sala di Prometeo at Palazzo Pitti, a few rooms from the paintings he helped buy.