Portrait of Violante Beatrice of Bavaria

The clothes are how the museum dates this. Violante of Bavaria had married Ferdinando de' Medici, the heir to Tuscany, and when he died in 1713 she was left a widow at a court where she would never be grand duchess. She sits here in mourning dress with a cross at her breast, probably quartz, so the pastel cannot be earlier than 1713, and the museum will commit to nothing narrower than that and about 1720. Giovanna Fratellini had grown up inside the Medici household and worked almost entirely in pastel, then a fashionable and quick way of taking a likeness on paper. Violante kept her as her own portraitist. In 1717 she was sent to govern Siena, and between 1720 and 1722 she ordered from Fratellini a set of oval portraits of her ladies in waiting, Florentine and Sienese.