Anna Maria Louisa de' Medici as a Girl

The small girl in this portrait would be the last of the Medici. Anna Maria Luisa was born in 1667, the only daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo the Third, and Sustermans, by then in his seventies, painted her here as a young child in stiff court silk. She would outlive her father and both brothers, marry an elector of the Palatinate in Germany, and come home to Florence a childless widow as the line ran out. In 1737, near the end of her own life, she signed the agreement Florence still thanks her for, the Family Pact, which left the whole Medici hoard of paintings, statues and curiosities to the Tuscan state on the condition that none of it ever leave the city, kept for the benefit of the public of every nation. The rooms around this small portrait still hold much of what her pact kept in Florence.