The architect, artist and first historian of Italian art Giorgio Vasari painted this portrait commissioned by Alessandro de Medici many years after the death of the person depicted on it.
Lorenzo the Magnificent was the grandson of Cosimo the Elder Medici and concentrated all power over Florence in his hands, but at the same time patronized artists and poets and himself wrote poetry. The time of his reign was the “golden age” of Florentine art.
But this portrait depicts a man who looks tired, immersed in his thoughts, indifferent to glory, and to the wealth that the red purse hints at, and even to the fact that he was declared a “vessel of all virtues,” as the inscription testifies behind. Vasari expressed in the painting a longing for time, when painting, poetry and the words of humanists found a response in the soul of the ruler.
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