Portrait of Prince Valdemar Christian of Denmark

In 1638 a Danish boy of 16 reached Florence on the long educational tour through Italy that northern noblemen were expected to make, and the Medici court did what it did with every visiting royal and sent him to its portraitist. Nothing on the front of the canvas names him. The identification is written on the back, in Italian, the son of the king of Denmark, and in 1895 the Danish scholar Francis Beckett matched that line to Valdemar Christian, a son of Christian the Fourth by his second wife Kirsten Munk. The marriage was morganatic, so he was a count of Schleswig-Holstein and not a prince of the blood. Five years after he sat here, Danish diplomacy sent him to Moscow to marry Irina, daughter of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich. He refused to become Orthodox, the match failed, and he was held in the city until the tsar died in 1645. None of that had happened yet when he posed in gilt-damascened armour with a wide lace collar and a blue sash.