Portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent

This portrait belongs to a whole gallery of famous faces. In the 1550s Duke Cosimo the First of Florence sent the young painter Cristofano dell'Altissimo north to Como, to copy the collection of portraits the scholar Paolo Giovio had assembled there of illustrious men from across history. The copies came back to Florence by the hundred, and this likeness of Lorenzo the Magnificent, made around 1567, is one of them. Lorenzo, who ruled Florence in all but name until his death in 1492, was the great-grandfather of Cosimo, so his image tied the duke's line to its most admired ancestor. The whole series hangs today along the upper corridors of the Uffizi, the building Cosimo himself commissioned.