Portrait of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici

By 1586, when this portrait was paid for, the man in it had been dead for more than 80 years. Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici, eldest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ruled Florence for barely two years before the city threw him out in 1494 for surrendering its fortresses to a French army marching through Tuscany. Florentines nicknamed him Piero the Unfortunate. He never came home, and drowned in 1503 crossing a river during a battle near the Garigliano. So the face here is imagined rather than drawn from life, there was no longer anyone to sit for it. The Medici, by then secure grand dukes of Tuscany, were assembling a gallery of family portraits, and even the ancestor who lost the city earned a place in it. The painter was Giovanni Battista Paggi, a Genoese who had fled to Florence after killing a man in a quarrel back home and found steady work at the Medici court. The records are precise about the sum: he was paid 45 scudi for the panel on the 9th of August, 1586.