Portrait of Leopoldo de' Medici in swaddling

The picture carries its own date. The inscription gives 6 November 1617 and calls the sitter the eighth-born prince, Leopoldo, which is the day he was born here at the Pitti to Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena of Austria. The museum reads the child as six or seven months old, which puts the painting in 1618, made in the building where it still hangs. Who made it is less settled. The canvas was long given to Tiberio Titi, portraitist to the grand-ducal court, and the older inventory sheets still carry his name. The Uffizi now give it to Jacopo Ligozzi from Verona, following inventories that run from 1637 into the later 17th and 18th centuries. The baby in the swaddling bands grew up to be Cardinal Leopoldo, who studied with Galileo and founded a scientific academy with his brother the grand duke, and whose own collection came into these galleries when he died in 1675.