Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola

A paper scroll attached to the book bears the signature of the Brescian artist and the date 1524. The inscription, abraded and almost illegible, doesn’t provide any other useful information, for example regarding the identity of the person portraied. For a long time the picture was thought to be a portrait of the Dominican visionary and preacher Girolamo Savonarola, burned at the stake in 1498. The friar, whose dark habit is, instead, Franciscan, holds a palm of martyrdom with a ribbon twisted around it bearing the motto «justus ut palma florebit».