Portrait of Giuliano da Sangallo

In the early 1480s Giuliano da Sangallo was on his way to becoming the leading architect in Florence, and within a few years he would be building a country villa at Poggio a Caiano for Lorenzo de' Medici. Piero di Cosimo shows him turned toward us under a black cap, and puts his trade on the red ledge in front of him, a pair of compasses and a quill pen. Portraits that announced what the sitter did for a living were still rare, and this pair is among the earliest. The biographer Vasari saw both panels in the house of Giuliano's son Francesco. Over the following centuries the names of painter and sitters were lost, until 1879, when the Italian critic Gustavo Frizzoni noticed that this face matched the woodcut portrait in Vasari's book. The diptych belongs to the Mauritshuis in The Hague and hangs here on loan.