Biagio Milanesi

This face was once a small part of something much larger. In 1500 Perugino finished a towering altarpiece for the abbey of Vallombrosa in the hills above Florence, commissioned by Biagio Milanesi, the head of the Vallombrosan monks. Along its base ran a predella, and this is one of only two panels from it that survive, a portrait of Milanesi himself, the man who paid for the whole thing. Perugino gives him sharp, particular features, the kind of close observation Italian painters were then learning from Flemish portraits. The great altarpiece is now in the Accademia in Florence, while this fragment of its patron hangs a few streets away in the Uffizi.