Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci

By the time this likeness was copied for Florence, Leonardo had been dead some 40 years, and already almost no one could say for certain what he had looked like. Paolo Giovio, the collector whose gallery of famous faces stands behind this whole series, had known artists of Leonardo's world and wrote one of the earliest short accounts of his life, praising a brilliant man who left so much unfinished. The profile here, with its long beard and heavy brow, became one of the images that fixed Leonardo in later memory as the wise old sage. Whether it records his real face or the idea people already carried of it is impossible to settle now.