Portrait of Ferdinando II on the Ninth Day of Smallpox

On 16 October 1626 word went round the Florentine court that the grand duke of Tuscany had smallpox. He was 16. He had held the title since he was ten, and his mother and grandmother were still governing in his name. Sustermans was already at work on a portrait of him when the illness began, and what came out of that autumn is a record of the disease instead. Two small canvases survive, and they are told apart only by the line of lettering along the top edge. One gives the seventh day. This one, in capitals, gives the ninth.

By the ninth day the swelling has almost closed his eyes. He lies in red, which was the treatment of the period, since red cloth and red hangings were thought to draw the sickness out through the skin. The canvas is 45 centimetres tall.

Ferdinando II recovered and ruled for another 44 years. The state portraits made afterwards give him smooth, unmarked skin. Both pictures stayed in the family and were listed as Sustermans's work in a Medici inventory of 1674.