Porträt des Stefano Colonna

The man in the burnished armor is Stefano Colonna, a professional soldier who hired out his sword to popes and princes. Nearly 20 years before Bronzino painted him in 1546, Colonna had helped defend Pope Clement VII when the emperor's mutinous troops sacked Rome in 1527, one of the most traumatic events of that age. By the 1540s he commanded the armies of Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, and Bronzino, the Medici court painter, gives him a hand resting on his helmet and a steady, unhurried gaze. Two years after the picture was finished, it hung in the church of San Lorenzo for his funeral, a portrait turned into a memorial.