Retrato de Lorenzo de’ Medici

Lorenzo de' Medici had been dead for more than forty years when Vasari painted this around 1534. He never sat for it. The commission came from the new Medici duke, Alessandro, who had just taken power in Florence after a brief return of the old republic, and who wanted his brilliant ancestor summoned up to make the family's rule look natural and deserved. So Vasari built the portrait as an argument. Around the pensive Lorenzo he set inscribed pillars and carefully chosen objects, a lamp, a mask standing for vice, a vase for virtue, an inscription that virtue defeats the vices. This was Medici image-making, meant to justify a dukedom, from the hand of the same Vasari who a few years later would write the Lives of the Artists.