Portrait of Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici

On 12 December 1667 Pope Clement IX made Leopoldo de' Medici a cardinal, and it was probably around that Roman visit, when Leopoldo came to receive the red hat, that this portrait was painted. He sits in the crimson of his new rank, a heavyset man of about fifty looking steadily out. What that calm face hides is one of the great collecting minds of the century. Leopoldo gathered rare books, coins, drawings, Venetian paintings, and above all the self-portraits of artists, and it was he who began the Uffizi's famous collection of painters picturing themselves. The Venetian pictures still hanging in the gallery came down from him.