Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence (1510-1537)

In his Life of Pontormo, Giorgio Vasari notes a small painting - 'un quadretto grande quanto un foglio di carta mezzana' ('a picture as large as a half-size standard sheet of paper') - made in preparation for the three-quarter-length portrait of Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (G. Vasari, Le vite de'più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori, Florence, 1568, part 3, II, p. 490). The present painting relates to a group of portraits, which feature the same face as the Philadelphia painting, albeit bareheaded and dressed in a coat of mail, and are presumed for the most part to have been made by the workshop of Bronzino after Pontormo's lost quadretto (see K. Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici: 15th-18th Centuries, I, Florence, 1981, p. 222, no. 6).