The Senators of Florence swearing Allegiance to Ferdinando II de’ Medici

Cosimo the Second, grand duke of Tuscany, died on 28 February 1621 at the age of 30. The Florentine Senate and the leading men of the city gathered 11 days later in the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio to swear allegiance to his heir, Ferdinando the Second, who was ten years old. Sustermans painted the ceremony four years afterwards, with the boy enthroned and the two women who actually governed for him standing in the room, his mother Maria Maddalena of Austria and his grandmother Cristina of Lorraine. Among the real faces he set figures out of allegory, Tuscany receiving an olive branch from Peace and a river god reclining at the left for the Arno. What hangs here is the modello, the small worked-out version. The large canvas went up at the Pitti in 1626 and is in the Uffizi today, while this one surfaced on the art market and was bought by the Italian State in 1981.