Franz Ferdinand Richter

(1693 - 1743)

oil on oval canvas, framed, some defects

cm 74,5x56

The following technical sheet of the work was created by Professor Sandro Bellesi as part of the inventory of the paintings of the Fattoria Franceschini. In a fairly conservative state, the canvas shows little more than half-length Gian Gastone de 'Medici (Florence, 1671-1737), third son of Cosimo III and Marguerite Louise d'Orléans, seventh and last Grand Duke of Tuscany of his dynasty. Based on the comparison of the character's face with that present in the large portrait dedicated to the Grand Duke made around 1735 by the Polish painter Franz Ferdinand Richter, now preserved in the Uffizi Gallery, it is possible to assign the same artist to the work in question. Depicted in armor rather than in ceremonial clothes as in the museum specimen, Gian Gastone stands out, like most of Richter's portraits, for the ostentatious realism in the description of the face, where the "ugliness" of the features of the figure, very evident softness of the cheeks, in the long aquiline nose and in the mouth with excessively swollen or tumid lips. The accentuation of the almost griffin features of the figure find ample correspondence in the so-called humorous and charged vein which, finding correspondence in the contemporary sculptures of masters with Giovacchino Fortini and Antonio Montauti, was very much in vogue in Tuscan portraiture of the early eighteenth century. The work will be published by Sandro Bellesi in his next studio