Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder

A young man looks straight at us, holding up a golden medal of the most powerful Florentine of his age. Nobody has ever agreed on who he is.

The story behind the painting

Botticelli painted this portrait in tempera; it is also called Portrait of a Youth with a Medal. Wikipedia dates it to about 1475, while Wikidata gives 1474. It hangs in the Uffizi in Florence and measures 57.5 by 44 cm. The medal the young man holds shows Cosimo de' Medici in profile. It seems to match a medal possibly designed by Donatello and cast in 1465, known as Cosimo de' Medici as Pater Patriae, an example of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The portrait therefore links a living face with the memory of the man who founded the Medici house's power.

What to look for

The young man is seated before a landscape, and he gazes directly out at the viewer. He wears clothes suited to the middle class. His hands frame the medal in a triangle, holding it at the center of the picture. Look closely at the medal itself: it is not painted but built up. It is a pastiglia imitation of a real metal medal, made of gilded gesso and set into the panel. Because the image is not reversed, Botticelli must either have had the original mold or made a cast from the medal to shape his gesso. The gold catches the light differently from the painted surface around it.

Meaning and intent

The heart of the work is its mystery. In 1900 George Noble Plunkett identified the sitter, scornfully, as Piero de' Medici. Guido Cornini lists other theories: one of the medal's possible makers, a member of the Medici family, even Cosimo himself, or, as he thought most likely, Antonio Botticelli, the painter's brother, who also recast and gilded medals for the Medici court and resembles Botticelli's self-image in the Adoration of the Magi. The direct gaze might even be the artist looking in a mirror. Frederick Hartt suggested Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, whose medal portraits vary.

Legacy

The debate is still open. In 1982 a rarely seen Botticelli, a Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, appeared at auction, and some have wondered whether it is a companion piece; it has been linked, without real evidence, to Giovanni il Popolano, which would make this youth possibly his brother Lorenzo. Whatever the answer, the portrait shows how Botticelli could make loyalty, memory and identity visible in one gesture. A young man presents a medal, and five centuries of viewers have tried to read his face.