Portrait of Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici

Nobody wrote down when this was painted. The museum dates it to about 1695 from how old Ferdinando de' Medici looks in it, and finds the picture itself listed in the Grand Prince's own household inventory. There is a complication a few rooms away. The same collection holds a second, shorter portrait of Ferdinando in the same dress, near enough identical, and the two have been shuffled between names for decades. The scholar Marco Chiarini gave that other version to Cassana, then took it back and gave it to Pietro Dandini, a Florentine painter of the same years, on the strength of an inventory drawn up in 1713 and of differences in the handling of the paint. This one, in the Sala di Prometeo, has stayed Cassana's throughout. Its frame carries a small label naming both painter and sitter.