Portrait of Pope Leo X

This is a copy, and it does not hide the fact. Around 1585 the Florentine painter Ludovico Buti reproduced the head and shoulders of Raphael's celebrated portrait of Pope Leo X, which then, as now, hung in Florence. Leo X mattered to the men who ordered the copy. Born Giovanni de' Medici, a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he was the first of the family to become pope, elected in 1513, and by the 1580s the Medici were Grand Dukes of Tuscany, keen to keep their illustrious relatives in plain view. Raphael had shown the pope heavy-featured and short-sighted, a reading glass in his hand, a shrewd likeness rather than a flattering one. Buti lifts him out of that famous group, where two cardinal cousins once stood behind him, and lets him sit alone, a single Medici face meant to be known across the room.