Portrait of Four Servants of the Medici Court

On 7 November 1684 this canvas went into the Medici wardrobe office with a batch of pictures meant for the grand-ducal villas of Petraia and Castello, outside Florence. The clerk who logged it wrote down who was in it. They were servants in the household of Cosimo III, and the journal names them: Cristofanino the hunchback, a dwarf, another small hunchbacked man who had come from Livorno, the Moor, and Caporal Buccia. Gabbiani's biographer, writing not much later, called them young men of distant nations at the grand duke's court, and explained the dish of fresh spinach one of them holds out as a joke about his gift for carrying other people's business around the palace. The Uffizi has gone back to this painting in recent years, through its research into Black figures in the Medici collections, to try to put more than a nickname to those faces.