(Florence 1703–1774)
Portrait of Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain (1745–1792), as Grand Duchess of Tuscany, later Holy Roman Empress, half-length, wearing the Order of the Starry Cross,
oil on canvas, 87 x 73 cm, framed

bears inscription on the relined canvas on the reverse: PIATTOLI/1766

We are grateful to Gloria Martínez Leiva for endorsing the attribution on the basis of a photograph.

The present painting is one of the earliest portraits of the Grand Duchess, painted in 1766 by the Florentine artist Gaetano Piattoli. He was a pupil of François Rivière and court painter to the Grand Dukes. His wife Anna was a very renowned pastellist. Piattoli paid registration fees at the Accademia in Florence from 1738 onwards, and was elected academician on 11 January 1739 and consigliere in 1762. His self-portrait is part of the portrait collection of the Corridoio Vasariano in Florence (inv. 1890, no. 2029).

Maria Luisa’s father, the future Charles III of Spain, had become King of Naples and Sicily in 1735. After her father became King of Spain at the death of her half-uncle, Ferdinand VI, in 1759 she moved with her family to Spain. In 1764 she was married by proxy to Leopold, the third son of Empress Maria Theresa I, Holy Roman Empress, and Francis, Duke of Lorraine and the heir apparent to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The next year, on 5 August, she married Leopold in person at Innsbruck. Only a few days later, the death of Emperor Francis made Maria Luisa’s husband the new Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the couple moved to Florence. They arrived in Florence in late summer 1765 where they were settled in the Palazzo Pitti.

At the time of her wedding, Maria Luisa was described as a blue-eyed beauty with a vivid charm, unpretentious and simple and with a disposition to be generous and kind, as an ideal ‘model of feminine virtue’. The relationship between Maria Luisa and Leopold has been described as happy, and Maria Luisa as a supporting and loyal wife. As Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Maria Luisa made herself appreciated in the first year in Florence, during the famine of 1765, when she provided the poor and needing with food and medical aid. In 1790, on the death of Leopold’s childless brother, Joseph II, Maria Luisa’s husband inherited the Habsburg lands in Central Europe, and was shortly thereafter elected Holy Roman Emperor. Taking the name of Leopold II, the new Emperor moved his family to Vienna, where Maria Luisa took on the role of imperial consort. Leopold died on 1 March 1792. Maria Luisa followed her husband to the grave in less than three months, not living long enough to see her eldest son Francis elected as the last Holy Roman Emperor. She was buried next to her husband in the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna.