Italian Renaissance Portraiture, Francesco Salviati’s Painting Of Bindo Altoviti, Donated To The Met
On The Table Read Magazine, “the best arts magazine in the UK“, an exceptional oil painting by the well-known Italian artist Francesco Salviati (1510–1563) was presented as a gift to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art .
Bindo Altoviti
The arresting portrait of Bindo Altoviti (1491–1557), a powerful Florentine banker and one of the most significant political opponents of the Medici rulers, is executed on a marble slab that is one inch thick by artist Francesco Salviati. The monumental painting was The Met’s first marble painting acquisition. It comes as a gift from Assadour “Aso” O. Tavitian’s trust.
Bindo Altoviti was one of the wealthiest and most influential men of his time. He was born in Rome to Florentine parents. He made loans to a succession of popes, the Venetian government, and European powers like King Henry II of France as part of a politically savvy strategy. He was the leader of the Florentine community in Rome. Until he became a supporter of the Farnese Pope Paul III (r. 1534–149), he was neutral toward the Medici family. Bindo was outspokenly anti-Medicean beginning at the end of the 1540s, and in 1554, Cosimo I de’ Medici finally declared him a rebel.
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At various points in his life, Bindo, a major supporter of the arts, had his image taken: as a young man by Raphael around 1512, and in a bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini in 1549, several years after Salviati’s portrait. There is no other Renaissance sequence of portraits of a sitter from youth to old age by such a remarkable group of artists.
The painting’s significance to art and history cannot be overstated, as Marina Kellen French Director of The Met Max Hollein explained. The work of Salviati is truly extraordinary, both in terms of its painterly execution and its marble-based materiality. The subject’s bold, educated, and independent nature are simultaneously conveyed in the lavish portrait, which brilliantly captures the subject’s immense wealth and social standing. They are forever indebted to the late Aso O. Tavitian for bringing this important European painting to our collection.