Cristofano dell'Altissimo

In July 1552 a Florentine painter travelled north to Como, on the lake below the Alps, with an unusual assignment. Paolo Giovio, a bishop and historian, had spent some 30 years gathering painted portraits of famous men, from soldiers and popes to scholars and distant sultans, into a private gallery he called his museum. Giovio had just died, and Duke Cosimo I de' Medici wanted the whole collection copied for Florence before the originals could scatter.

That painter was Cristofano dell'Altissimo, and the work swallowed much of his life. He sent 24 finished heads south by 1553, more the following year, and kept at it on and off for decades, copying well over 280 of the portraits in all. Giovio's own gallery was later broken up and lost, so for many of these faces Cristofano's copy is now the closest thing we have to the vanished original.

The series still hangs where it was meant to, along the First Corridor of the Uffizi, put on view there in 1587 and never moved since.