This elegant yet informal portrait was painted in Florence in the middle of the sixteenth century, at a time when portraiture in that city was entering one of its most memorable and magnificent phases. Its author Michele Tosini was an important member of the Florentine art world in this mannerist period, and his large and well run bottega was considered alongside those of Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572) and Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), as the most important in the city. Tosini was trained in the workshop of Lorenzo di Credi (1459–1537) but in 1525 became an associate of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (1483–1561), whose surname he later adopted and whose workshop he took over after 1564. Together with Vasari and Bronzino, Michele was also a founder member of Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1563, and his workshop’s role in the training of young painters, among them Girolamo Macchietti (c. 1541–1592) and Mirabello Cavalori (1535–1572), and in the development of painting in that city, has long been overlooked. Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, described Michele’s works as executed with ‘bellissima practica’ or ‘very beautiful mastery’.¹ Vicenzo Borghini, writing to Cosimo de’Medici in 1565, described Michele as ‘…of sound judgement, and able’, and added ‘…you can certainly trust him’.²

Although better known as a painter of decorative and religious commissions, Michele di Ridolfo was also a portrait painter of some interest, although as yet no signed or documented examples survive, and the extent of his patronage awaits more definition. Philippe Costamagna was the first to attribute this portrait to his hand, and to begin to disentangle his work in this vein from that of more famous contemporaries such as Bronzino and Francesco Salviati (1510–1562). The present portrait epitomises what we know of Michele’s work as a portraitist. The handsome young sitter is expensively dressed in a slashed black doublet and sleeves, with white lace collar and ruffs, his black cloak draped over one shoulder. Before a plain wall with twin pilasters, he sits informally astride a stool, as if to better display his equally fashionable hose. A very similar architectural setting is found in the smaller Portrait of a Lady, sold, New York, Christie’s, 19 April 2007, lot 17 for $504,000 (fig. 1).

He carries gloves and a sword, while his dog stands alongside him. Though the portrait bears no armorial device, the bearing of the sitter suggests that if not noble himself, he certainly wished to be seen as an aspirant to such high social standing, and was perhaps drawn from the rising class of merchants and bankers then to be found in Florence. As all scholars have pointed out, the presence of the sword and the dog – a traditional symbol of fidelity and vigilance – would also be understood as appropriate to an aristocratic sitter.³

The style of this portrait reflects Michele di Ridolfo’s gradual adoption from the 1550s onwards of the fashionable maniera of Salviati and Bronzino and – no doubt through the encouragement of Giorgio Vasari – an understanding of the style of Michelangelo. The sitter’s unusual seated pose, for example, is, as Costamagna observes, loosely derived from Michelangelo’s statue of Giuliano de’ Medici of 1526–34 which Michele could have seen in the Medici chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence (fig. 2).⁴ Although Michele di Ridolfo’s independent practice as a portraitist is only slowly beginning to emerge from the mass of mid-century Florentine portraits, the present painting, as Costamagna observes, can be compared to one of the few portraits generally accepted as by Michele’s hand, namely the Portrait of a nobleman hunting formerly in the Antinori Collection in Florence and now in private hands in Milan.⁵ Here we find closely comparable passages in the handling of the physiognomies of the sitters and the recurring motif of the faithful dog. Similarly, the distinctive architectural background is quite clearly derived by Francesco Salviati’s half-length portraits of the same date, such as the Portrait of a man in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples,⁶ and recurs in two further male portraits formerly attributed to Salviati which have also been associated with Michele or his circle. These are the Gentleman with a letter in the Uffizi in Florence,⁷ or the Portrait of a man with a letter dated 1558 and formerly with Wildenstein, later sold New York, Sotheby’s 6 June 2012, lot 10 (fig. 3), when it was attributed to Michele’s pupil Mirabello Cavalori.⁸ All three portraits share a common elegance and a decorative love of detail, notably in the details of costume. The handling of the head in the present painting is also reminiscent of the facial types to be found in Michele’s fresco of The Adoration of the Magi of 1561 in the Villa Strozzi in Paolini.⁹ Taken together these affinities would suggest a possible dating for the present painting to the second half of the 1550s, and Costamagna suggests a dating to around 1555. The fluid handling of the paint, articulated with freely applied touches of the brush, reveals Tosini’s study of Salviati’s work of the same period, but the picture lacks the rigour of design that he would later learn from his partnership with Vasari the following decade.¹⁰ Although not an innovator as Bronzino and Salviati were, Michele di Ridolfo’s independent portraits such as this would undoubtedly be seminal in the spread of the new Florentine style from the mid-sixteenth century onwards.

We are grateful to Alex Wengraf for his help in researching the provenance.

¹ G. Vasari, Vite, 1550, G. Milanesi (ed.) 1878–85, vol. VI, pp. 543–48. Vasari describes the relationship between the two men as very close and records that Michele loved his teacher as his own father.

² Giovanni Bottari, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura scultura ed architettura scritte da’ più celebri Professori che in dette Arti fiorirono dal secolo XV al XVII, 7 vols, Rome, 1754–73, I, 1754, pp. 90–147. Borghini was the Surintendent of the Foundling Hospital in Florence, and the Duke’s representative on the committee of the newly-founded Accademia. Michele Tosini’s was one of only three workshops (the others being those of Vasari and Bronzino) recommended by Borghini to the Duke as capable of carrying out the decorative projects required for the ceremonial entry of Joanna of Austria into Florence on the occasion of her marriage to Francesco I de’ Medici.

³ In this respect it is worth noting that Michele’s teacher and later partner Ridolfo di Ghirlandaio was one of the few painters who moved in the same social circles as his patrons. The family of Ridolfo’s wife, Contessina di Giovanbatista di Bianco Deti, whom he married in 1510, had enjoyed high rank since the mid-14^th century. On this and the collaboration between the two artists see D. Franklin, ‘Towards a new chronology for Ridolfo Ghirlandaio and Michele Tosini’, The Burlington Magazine, CXL, 1998, p. 445.

⁴ Costamagna 2005, p. 319.

⁵ See the catalogue of the exhibition Mostra dei tesori delle case Fiorentine, Florence 1960, p. 24, no. 45.