Portrait of Angiola Biondi

The woman in the shepherdess costume is Angiola Biondi, and she was a real person with a job. She was a dwarf in the service of Violante Beatrice of Bavaria, wife of the Medici heir Ferdinando, and he had her painted in 1707, a year he mentions the picture in a letter. Court portraits of this kind were usually a fiction of leisure, and the arcadian landscape behind her is exactly that. The animals crowded beside her are not. The museum's record says plainly that they are there to make her height register, an ordinary sheep or goat used as a measuring stick. Those animals were probably not painted by Cassana at all. His brother Giovanni Agostino specialised in them, and the family seems to have divided the canvas between them.