Portrait of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere

The man in the armour had been dead for at least 14 years when this was painted. Giovanni de' Medici, the mercenary captain everyone called Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, took a shot from a light cannon at Mantua in 1526, had the leg amputated, and died at 28.

His son Cosimo was seven at the time. By the 1540s that son was Duke of Florence and had a use for a father worth descending from, and portraits of Giovanni began to appear in Medici hands. A Salviati portrait of him is listed in an inventory of 1553, referred to in a letter of 1585, and described by Vasari among the pictures in Cosimo's wardrobe rooms.

The gallery files this panel as attributed to Salviati rather than certainly by him, and its own record will date it no more closely than somewhere between about 1540 and about 1560.