Portrait of Michael Tarchaniota Marullus

The man in this portrait was a Greek poet and soldier, Michele Marullo Tarcaniota, whose family had fled the collapse of the Byzantine world as the Ottomans took Constantinople and the lands around it. He made his living partly as a mercenary and partly by writing elegant Latin verse, and in the 1490s he moved among the humanist scholars gathered under the Medici in Florence, where Botticelli worked. Botticelli paints him plainly, in dark clothes against a bare wall, all the attention held on an alert, guarded face. There is no halo here, no saint and no myth, only a living scholar looked at closely. Marullo drowned in 1500 when his horse threw him into a flooded river in Tuscany.