Coperta di ritratto con grottesche

In the early 1500s a Florentine portrait was often a private possession, kept behind a thin wooden panel that slid away to reveal the sitter. This is one of those covers, painted around 1510 for the veiled woman now hanging beside it in the Uffizi. Before you reached her face you met this instead: a single theatrical mask set among bronze-coloured grotesques, with dolphins, dragons and a flaming urn, and a Latin tablet reading SVA CVIQVE PERSONA, to each his own mask. Persona in Latin meant exactly that, the mask an actor wore, so the cover made a small joke about the hidden portrait before letting you see it. At some point the two panels were parted, which helped a hopeful dealer sell the portrait as a Leonardo. The cover travelled on its own until Ettore de Garriod bought it from a Roman merchant and gave it to the Florentine galleries in 1867. Long thought to be near Raphael, whose manner Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio knew well, it now hangs again close to the face it was made to conceal.