Portrait of Ugolino Martelli

Bronzino painted this young man around 1537, in Florence, a city just settling under Medici dukes after decades of upheaval. The sitter is Ugolino Martelli, from a well-off Florentine family, and everything around him advertises a certain kind of learning. His finger marks a page of Homer's Iliad in the original Greek, and books by Virgil and the writer Bembo lie nearby. Bronzino gives him the smooth, cool polish that the Florentine elite prized in a portrait. The setting is the courtyard of the Martelli family palace, and over the young man's shoulder stands a marble David the family owned, a statue then attributed to Donatello.