The Florentine Art School is one of the world’s most famous. It played a special role in European art: It was where a new type of palazzo (Italian palace) was created, and Mannerism, a more artificial style compared to Renaissance painting, emerged and started to evolve.

In the collection of the Tambov Regional Picture Gallery, the Florentine school is represented by one picture only. It is A Man’s Portrait by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, a popular Italian painter of the 16th century.

Ridolfo was born in the family of Domenico Ghirlandaio di Bigordi, the author of a cycle of frescoes depicting Biblical characters. The boy received his first painting lessons from his father. When still a young man, Ghirlandaio Junior worked at the Medici court in Florence; he painted portraits and pictures based on religious and mythological subjects. On the walls of a hall at the Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace), he created a huge fresco with images of Florence’s first bishop and heroes of the Roman Republic: Brutus, Cicero, Scipio. His first solo and the best-known work was The Madonna (1507), which can still be seen at the Prato Cathedral.

Later, Ghirlandaio experienced influence of the painters Fra Bartolommeo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. Giorgio Vasari, a biographer of Italian masters, tells a story of Raphael hurrying to leave Florence for Rome and entrusting Ridolfo Ghirlandaio with finishing the Madonna’s clothes in The Beautiful Gardener. Afterwards, Ghirlandaio himself opened a large workshop that employed many apprentices and assistants.

A Man’s Portrait from the Tambov Gallery’s collection belongs to the first half of the 16th century. Ghirlandaio portrayed Piero Soderini, a statesman, who was elected gonfaloniere of justice in 1502. It was a public office; its holders were in charge of internal affairs of the Republic of Florence. The portrait is executed in a minimalistic style.

A laconic composition, the character of the image and its coloristic pattern refer to portraits of the Quattrocento, i.e. Italian art of the 15th century. That period is also called Early Renaissance; it was at that time that Botticelli, Donatello and Brunelleschi created their most famous works.

A Man’s Portrait was part of the collection of Boris Chicherin, a Tambov public figure of the 19th century. In 1873, Alexander Sidorov, a restoration artist of the Imperial Hermitage, transferred the picture from wood to canvas.