Portrait of Lorenzo de' Lorenzi

This small tempera panel is dated to about 1492, a heavy year in Florence. In April Lorenzo de' Medici, called the Magnificent, died, and the friar Girolamo Savonarola was drawing bigger and bigger crowds with his sermons against luxury and vanity. The sitter is no prince. He is a private Florentine, Lorenzo di Ser Piero Lorenzi, set against a plain green ground with nothing to explain who he was beyond his steady, slightly wary look. Botticelli was in his late forties by then and would spend his last years increasingly under Savonarola's spell, his painting turning graver and more austere. The picture reached Philadelphia through the collector John G. Johnson, whose paintings passed to the city in 1917.