Portrait of Niccolò Strozzi

This portrait of the sophisticated banker and sometime poet, through its steady upward gaze and the slight tilt of the head, conveys the intellectual alertness as well as the self-assurance of this obese man. The bulging curves of the head neither degenerate into caricature nor do they seem an idealizing alteration. An inscription on the underside of the marble bust reveals that this piece, acquired from the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, was made in the “Eternal City”. It is one of the earliest examples of the revival of portraiture for its own sake in the fifteenth century. The formal device by which the base is also the level at which the subject is cropped associates the sculpture with classical Roman portraits as well as medieval reliquary busts.