Biagio Milanesi

This face was once a small part of something much larger. In 1497 Biagio Milanesi, head of the Vallombrosan monks, ordered a towering altarpiece from Perugino for the abbey of Vallombrosa in the hills above Florence, and it was finished in 1500. Along its base ran a predella, and only two of its panels survive. This is one of them, a portrait of Milanesi himself, the man who paid for the whole thing. Perugino gives him sharp, particular features, the kind of close observation Florentine painters were then learning from Flemish portraits. When the French authorities suppressed the monastery in 1810, the altarpiece was sent to Paris, and it came back to Florence in 1817. Today the portrait of its patron hangs in the Sala del Colosso of the Galleria dell'Accademia, a few steps from the altarpiece it once stood beneath.