BUTTERI, attr. a

BUTTERI, attributed to PORTRAIT OF FERDINANDO I DE' MEDICI GIOVANNI MARIA BUTTERI Florence 1540 – 1606 Florence Oil on panel 62 × 49 cm / 24.4 × 19.3 inches with frame: 78 × 66 cm / 30.7 × 26 inches PROVENANCE Brussels, private collection In 1588, Ferdinando I de’ Medici, who had recently ascended to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany after the death of his brother, married Cristina of Lorraine. This dynastic union represented not only an important step in the personal life of the young grand duke but also the beginning of a conscious campaign to strengthen the political and cultural prestige of the Medici dynasty. A fundamental instrument in this strategy was the development of a new official iconography—a visual strategy carefully constructed to represent sovereign power. An unusual and particularly ambitious choice by Ferdinando was to entrust his official portrait not to a Florentine painter but to the Roman Scipione Pulzone, a leading figure in the papal artistic scene. The state portrait executed by Pulzone around 1590—now kept at the Uffizi—became an exemplary model of sober monumentality, combining ceremonial gravitas with a clear composition and a concentrated and introspective expression. The painting presented here is a version derived with great precision from Pulzone's composition, executed with remarkable fidelity and attention to detail. Particularly significant is the fact that this version is executed on panel, unlike the original on canvas: a choice fully consistent with Florentine practice of the late sixteenth century, which allows the work to be dated with certainty to the period of Ferdinando's rule. Under his successor, Cosimo II, the wooden support would in fact be progressively abandoned in favor of canvas, while the pictorial language would evolve towards more typically Baroque forms. The precision in rendering the somatic features, decorative elements, and compositional rhythm suggests that the artist had direct access to the original prototype, a circumstance that reinforces the attribution of the work to the workshop of Giovanni Maria Butteri (ca. 1540–1606), one of the most active and trusted court painters in Tuscany at the time. A pupil of Bronzino and Alessandro Allori, Butteri was involved in important decorative projects of the Medici court—from the decoration of villas and palaces to the ephemeral apparatus for the weddings of Ferdinando and Cristina. He also created pictorial variations derived from famous works, contributing to the construction of a veritable dynastic iconographic repertoire in the spirit of Medici glorification, a tradition established since the time of Cosimo I. His constant activity in the court environment makes the origin of this work in his workshop extremely credible. It is not, therefore, a simple derivation, but an official painting from the Medici environment, executed to respond to specific needs of ducal representation. The work constitutes a living testimony to the role of art as a political language, aimed at affirming the dignity, legitimacy, and authority of the dynasty.