| Artist | Sandro Botticelli |
|---|---|
| Year | c. 1474-1475 |
| Type | Tempera on panel |
| Dimensions | 57,5 cm × 44 cm (226 in × 17 in) |
| Location | Uffizi, Florence |
Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder, also known as Portrait of a Youth with a Medal, is a tempera painting by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. The painting features a young man displaying in triangled hands a medal stamped with the likeness of Cosimo de' Medici. The identity of the young man has been a long-enduring mystery. Completed in approximately 1475, it is on display in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.
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Central to the painting, seated before a landscape, is a young man with a medal between his hands. The man gazes out into the audience, while the medal displays the profiled likeness of Cosimo de' Medici. The medal is inset into the portrait as a gilded gesso impression.[1] As the medal is not reversed, evidently Botticelli either had access to the original mold or made a cast from the medal to produce his gesso.[2] The medal seems to date to the latter half of the 1460s.[3]
The portrait is remarkable in part for the orientation of its subject. In 1997's The Sculptures of Adrea del Verrocchio, Andrew Butterfield suggests that Botticelli may have "attempted to devise a new format for portraits" with this and his Smeralda Bandinelli, by placing his subjects in the same "continuum" with their audience, directly engaging him.[4]
The young man in the portrait has never been identified, but there has been considerable speculation. Writing in 1900, art historian George Noble Plunkett colorfully identified whom he believed the youth portrayed:
one realizes painfully that this is the Piero who has left an indelible stain on the Medici family by his betrayal of Florence. The small covetous eyes, the ignoble nose, the pursed animal mouth, with only the restraint of selfishness on it, the very manner in which he holds up the memorial of his house's founder, as though it were his badge of honor![5]
Contemporary biographer Guido Cornini notes other theories held by historians: the youth—who wears garments appropriate to the middle class—may be one of the possible designers of the medal (Michelozzo Niccolò Fiorentino, Cristoforo di Geremia), a member of the Medici family (including, possibly, Cosimo de' Medici himself) or, as he personally felt more likely, Antonio Botticelli, Botticelli's brother.[3] This, he asserts, is based on the strength of the likeness of the youth to Botticelli himself, as portrayed in his Adoration of the Magi. Antonio Botticelli had also recast and gilded medals,[3] working in the court of the Medicis.[6] In Botticelli (2004), Sean Connolly says that some critics also believe that the young man may have been a Medici follower, but notes that "the subject is almost as mysterious as Leonardo's Mona Lisa.[7] Gloria Fossi in Uffizi Gallery (2001) calls the subject "one of the most enigmatic models of the Renaissance."[8]
The origin of the painting is almost as mysterious as its model. While it is unknown who commissioned it or where it spent the first century of its existence, it passed at some point to Carlo de' Medici.[8] Upon Carlo de' Medici's death in 1666, it entered the collection of the Uffizi. The painting was restored in 1991.
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