Portrait of Francesco Giamberti da Sangallo

Francesco Giamberti was a Florentine architect and a musician, and he died in 1482. Piero di Cosimo seems to have painted him just afterwards, as one half of a pair with his son, the architect Giuliano da Sangallo, who hangs beside him. The old man is set in strict profile, under a red cap, with a round domed building in the landscape behind him. On the ledge in front lies a sheet of music. The two panels stayed with the family until 1567, later belonged to King James II of England, and passed to William III, the Dutch stadholder who took the English throne in 1688. They hung at his palace of Het Loo, were taken to Paris by the French in 1795 and came back in 1815. Both belong to the Mauritshuis in The Hague and have been on loan to the Rijksmuseum since 1948.