Portrait of Baccio Bandinelli

The face here belongs to Baccio Bandinelli, the sculptor who spent much of his career competing with Michelangelo for Florence's biggest commissions and rarely winning in public opinion. The portrait itself is a puzzle. The original was painted by Andrea del Sarto in the 1520s, and that panel is now lost. What hangs in the Uffizi is a careful copy made decades later, near the end of the 16th century, by a hand we cannot name. So we are looking at a copy of a vanished picture of a man whose marble still stands a few streets away. Bandinelli worked for the Medici and carved the Hercules and Cacus that shares the Piazza della Signoria with Michelangelo's David, a pairing that fed a rivalry he defended fiercely all his life. The lost likeness by del Sarto was valued enough that someone thought it worth copying once the first version had gone.