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Sandro Botticelli (painter) Italian, 1446 - 1510 Giuliano de' Medici, c. 1478/1480 tempera on panel Overall: 75.5 x 52.5 cm (29 3/4 x 20 11/16 in.) framed: 105.7 x 81.3 x 11.3 cm (41 5/8 x 32 x 4 7/16 in.) Samuel H. Kress Collection 1952.5.56 Not on View |
Giuliano, younger brother of Lorenzo, was nursing a bad knee on Easter 1478 and had to be helped to the cathedral—by men intending to kill him and his brother during mass. The assassins, members and supporters of the Pazzi family, banking rivals of the Medici, awaited their signal. As worshipers bowed their heads at the elevation of the host, Giuliano was brutally stabbed. Lorenzo escaped to the sacristy, remaining in its refuge while the Pazzi partisans attempted to seize the government. They soon failed, however, and Lorenzo resumed control.
The murder of Giuliano shocked Florence, and a number of portraits were ordered for public display to serve both as memorials and as warnings to other plotters. Botticelli's painting may have been the prototype for that series. The open window was a familiar symbol of death, alluding to the deceased's passage to the afterlife. Some scholars, noting the lowered eyelids, suggest this portrait was painted posthumously from a death mask. Most, however, believe it was begun before Giuliano's death, perhaps even commissioned by Giuliano himself to commemorate the death of his beloved Simonetta, two years earlier. On the ledge is a dove, which mates for life; it is perched on a dead branch, the only place, according to Renaissance lore, doves alight after their mates have died. Without written evidence, it is impossible to say for certain exactly what function this painting originally served.