Portrait of Ferdinando II de' Medici

Ferdinando the Second had worn the grand-ducal title since boyhood, and the ordeal that shaped his early reign was not a war. Between 1630 and 1633 plague tore through Florence and killed something like one resident in ten. The young grand duke stayed in the stricken city rather than retire to safety, and he was remembered for it long after. By the time Sustermans painted this, around 1653, that crisis lay 20 years behind him and his court had turned to quieter things, gathering scholars, instruments and pictures. He sits in dark court dress with the heavy gold collar of the Order of Saint Stephen, the Tuscan knightly order his family had founded, laid across his chest.