Butteri, Attributed To, Portrait Of Ferdinando I De Medici

BUTTERI, attr. to
PORTRAIT OF FERDINANDO I DE' MEDICI

GIOVANNI MARIA BUTTERI
Firenze 1540 - 1606 Firenze

Oil on panel
62 x 49 cm / 24.4 x 19.3 in, with frame 78 x 66 cm / 30.7 x 26 in

PROVENANCE
Bruxelles, private collection

In 1588, Ferdinando I de' Medici, having recently ascended the Tuscan throne following the death of his brother, married Christina of Lorraine. This dynastic union was not only a personal milestone for the young Grand Duke, but also marked the beginning of a deliberate campaign to enhance the political and cultural prestige of the Medici dynasty. A key instrument in shaping this new image was the development of an official portrait iconography—a carefully constructed visual strategy for representing sovereign power.

An unusual and strikingly ambitious decision on the part of the Grand Duke was to entrust his official portrait not to a Florentine painter, but to the Roman artist Scipione Pulzone, one of the leading figures of the papal artistic milieu. Pulzone’s state portrait of Ferdinando, painted around 1590 and now in the Uffizi, became a model of monumental restraint—combining ceremonial gravitas with a lucid compositional structure and a focused, introspective expression.

The present painting is a fragmentary yet precise repetition of Pulzone’s composition, executed with remarkable fidelity and attention to detail. Notably, this version is painted on a wooden panel, unlike the original, which was executed on canvas. Such a choice of support is characteristic of Florentine practice in the late 16th century, allowing the present work to be confidently dated to the reign of Ferdinando himself—at a time when panel was still in use. Under his son, Cosimo II, Florentine painting transitioned fully to canvas, and the visual language shifted toward more baroque expression.

The accurate rendering of facial features, decorative elements, and compositional rhythm strongly suggests that the artist had direct access to the original painting. This, in turn, makes it highly plausible to attribute the work to the workshop of Giovanni Maria Butteri (ca. 1540–1606), one of the most active court painters of late 16th-century Tuscany.

A pupil of Bronzino and Alessandro Allori, Butteri was involved in numerous major artistic commissions for the Medici court—from the decoration of palaces and villas to designing ephemeral spectacles for the wedding of Ferdinando and Christina. He also executed painted copies after other masters' works, thus contributing to the dynastic visual archive in the spirit of glorificazione—a tradition established under Cosimo I. His involvement in such projects makes his workshop a natural source for the creation of this version.

This is therefore not merely a derivative work, but an official court painting, conceived within the visual framework of ducal representation. Executed with access to the original model and intended to perpetuate the image of the sovereign, it stands as a vivid testimony to the role of art as a political language—affirming the dignity, legitimacy, and authority of the Medici.