Composition
Central to the painting, seated before a landscape, is a young man with a medal between his hands. The man gazes out into the audience, while the medal displays the profiled likeness of Cosimo de' Medici. The medal is a pastiglia imitation of a real metal medal, made of gilded gesso and inset into the portrait. As the medal is not reversed, evidently Botticelli either had access to the original mold or made a cast from the medal to produce his gesso. The medal appears to be the same as one possibly designed by Donatello and cast in 1465, an example of which is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, called "Cosimo de' Medici as Pater Patriae".(link)
The portrait is remarkable in part for the orientation of its subject. In 1997's The Sculptures of Adrea del Verrocchio, Andrew Butterfield suggests that Botticelli may have "attempted to devise a new format for portraits" with this and his Smeralda Bandinelli, by placing his subjects in the same "continuum" with their audience, directly engaging him.
Read more about this topic: Portrait Of A Man With A Medal Of Cosimo The Elder
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