Portrait of a Jester (Meo Matto)

The Medici kept fools the way they kept musicians. A buffone at the Florentine court was a member of the household, paid and clothed by it, and some of them worked madness, real or performed, as a trade. This man was known as Meo Matto, and the museum will not date his portrait more closely than before 1640.

He is shown from the waist up in a slashed striped doublet with an embroidered undersleeve, his mouth open in the middle of speaking. An old label on the frame gives him no name, only Portrait of a Jester.

The canvas is 64 centimetres tall and it lives in the gallery's stores. It came out in 2016 for an exhibition here at the Pitti about the jesters, peasants and gamblers of the Medici court. Scholars take it for one of the 35 Sustermans pictures gathered in this palace in 1678, after which the wardrobe papers place it in a private room of Grand Prince Ferdinando's apartment.