Portrait of Pope Leo X

The sitter is Giovanni de' Medici, who took the name Leo the Tenth when he was elected pope in 1513, the first Medici to hold the office. He was a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, made a cardinal at just 13, and his reign ran straight into the storm of 1517, when Martin Luther's protest in Germany began to split the Western church. This panel is a later Florentine copy, painted in 1567, that passes down the papal likeness fixed by Raphael's famous portrait of Leo with two cardinals. The pope appears heavy-set and short-sighted, the reading glass in Raphael's original a reminder of how much he loved books and pictures. The Medici kept versions of these family faces as a record of their own line.