The future discipline of the History of Art has its origins in the Florentine workshops, whose oral traditions were beginning to be committed to writing. Not only did the major artists’ workshops set their apprentices to study the works of the earlier Florentine masters they also compiled lore about the history of Florentine art. The collecting of older works is part of a larger trend in the cultural world of Medici-dominated Florence in the later fifteenth century. Also in 1490, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Piero succeeded in acquiring a painting he considered a Cimabue, the double-sided panel of the Presentation of John and Mary and the Lamentation currently in the Harvard Art Museums and now attributed to Lippo di Benivieni. 2 The monument’s relief portrait of the artist, sculpted by Benedetto da Maiano, shows Giotto at work on an archaizing mosaic icon of Christ, an actual work of mosaic embedded in Benedetto’s relief and in this sense comparable to Botticelli’s portrait with its inserted gold-ground Saint. Lorenzo de’ Medici, de facto ruler of the city in Botticelli’s time, promoted the erection of a monument to Giotto in the Florence Cathedral in 1490 (fig. 1: Benedetto da Maiano, Monument to Giotto, Florence Cathedral, 1490 / Scala, Art Resource, NYĮarly Italian painting was achieving venerable status in Florence in the later fifteenth century. The represented saint, or the altarpiece it came from, may have had some significance to the youth who holds it in Botticelli’s portrait, or to his family. Although the figure’s face, clothing, and pose are strongly based on Byzantine models, it is an Italian painting not much more than a century older than its host, probably a work of the Sienese painter Bartolomeo Bulgarini, who also worked in Florence. The painting of the saint is a piece of gold-ground panel painting that has been physically inserted into an excavated cavity in the panel. The figure inside the roundel offers a counterpoint to the modern youth: while the body of the young man turns to one side as his gaze meets ours, the saint faces us but looks upward and towards the light.
Inside the roundel’s molded frame is a gold-ground painting of a blessing saint. In the world of this portrait, a pause in the conversation is a condition of being.Īll portraits that show a sitter looking out at the viewer engage an implicit conversation, but in Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Roundel the sitter presents the viewer with a conversation piece, a round image somewhat formally presented by the youth in order for us to see it. The various elements of the face are poised, yet not quite settled into composure-a quality of youth and also perhaps more broadly an index of the electric cultural world that has produced this youth, a world to an unusual degree marked by brilliant young men flinting each other into mutual definition. The slightly raised right eyebrow confirms the bid for our attention even as it evinces confidence in his privilege. Like a buck, he fixes us with a calm but alert gaze, his posture balanced perfectly between reserve and appeal.
A pillow of golden hair sets off the youth’s fair but rosy face against the flat pale blue sky. His purplish-grey doublet and his green-grey eyes bring to life the hues of grey that surround him.
#Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome series#
The angled surfaces turn the greenish-grey stone into a series of contrasting stripes-light grey, dark grey, almost black-that isolate the youth inside multiple frames, like a jewel in a box. Urned towards the light, the young man is set against a crisp window embrasure made out of pietra serena, a local stone widely used in Florentine buildings. Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel
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