Alessandro de’ Medici

Jacopo Pontormo painted this small panel about 1534–35 as a study to which he and his workshop could return while producing the larger, formal state portraits of Alessandro de’ Medici, the first duke of Florence. Born the son of Pope Clement VII and installed as ruler of the city in 1529, Alessandro governed with a severity that made his brief reign notorious, and this likeness — the black armour, the heavy gold chain, the cool, appraising gaze set against a dark ground — fixes the image of the young duke that has come down to us. The picture belongs to the same years as the artist’s celebrated *Portrait of a Halberdier* and shows his mannerist idiom at its most distilled: the sharp contour, the compressed space and the aristocratic stillness that made him the outstanding portraitist of the later Florentine Renaissance. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.