This is a very fresh, intimate portrait when you consider that its subject had been dead for at least 80 years, and perhaps a whole century, when Bronzino painted it. In 16th-century Florence the Medici family established a Grand Dukedom, suppressing the city’s long history of republican politics, turning its government building into a private palace – and employing artists to glorify their family tree. Piero the Gouty was a short-lived but respected and fondly remembered early Renaissance banker, political broker and art patron. Here he is depicted by the brilliant Bronzino who also glamorised the living Medicis of his own time. He tries to get Piero right, by drawing on images done in his lifetime such as a moving marble bust by Mino da Fiesole, suggesting as it does both fragility and strength, steel and sadness.

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