Portrait of Piero de' Medici

Piero de' Medici had been dead for more than 80 years when this was painted. The state catalogue puts it between 1550 and 1560, in the Florence of Duke Cosimo I, and nobody in the workshop had seen the man. What they had was marble. Mino da Fiesole carved Piero's head in 1453, at the age of 37 by the inscription on it, and that bust, now in the Bargello, is where this painted face comes from. The catalogue files the canvas under Bronzino's workshop and raises a second name, Luigi Fiammingo, who is documented copying Bronzino. A close relative of it hangs in the National Gallery in London, given there largely to assistants as well. In 1864 the restorer Giovanni Secco Suardo lifted the paint layer onto canvas, which is the support it carries today.