The portrait presented here exemplifies  the Renaissance quintessence of the genre: the figure, a half-bust three-quarter view with highly individualized facial features, cinematically “pops” from the wooden panel on which it is painted, forcefully and incisively entering our space. Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio’s capacity to utilize Flemish-style naturalism and the characteristic elements of Italian portraiture make this painting an outstanding example of the Renaissance portrait. Like the Gioconda, for example, Pier Soderini is depicted with a parapet behind him (as if he were sitting on a balcony or a loggia), and in the background an expansive landscape in which natural elements, roads, towers and fortresses are meticulously illustrated.
The work’s attribution to Ridolfo goes back to Roberto Longhi’s well-known manuscript from April 23, 1957, but this painting has been published several times with the same indication by eminent scholars including Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, Sandro Bellesi and Elena Capretti. The interpretation of Flemish painting united with a language that tended to delineate very distinctive faces (as in Ridolfo’s Portrait of Girolamo Benivieni at the National Gallery in London, or the Portrait of a man at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA) is indicative of Ridolfo’s painting characterized by subjects with wrinkled flesh, sharp, penetrating eyes and a lively expressivity. The subject of this portrait, Piero di Tommaso Soderini, was born in Florence in 1451 and was a member of an illustrious Florentine family who held prestigious public offices by 1481. After a difficult and politically turbulent period in Florence (the rise of Savonarola and the temporary expulsion of the Medici), in 1502 he was named a lifelong gonfalonier of the Florentine Republic alongside important figures including Marcello Virgilio Adriani and Niccolò Macchiavelli.

One of the grand undertakings Soderini organized for the city of Florence was the decoration of the Great Council Chamber above the residence of the Signoria: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were asked to create wall paintings of the Battle of Anghiari and the Battle of Cascina respectively (the paintings never came to fruition). Soderini was also responsible for the placement in Piazza della Signoria of Michelangelo’s grandiose David, a gigantic emblem of virtue, love for the populace and faith in God. With the Medici’s return and the end of the Florentine Republic, Soderini was sentenced to exile (1512), although a year later he managed to obtain a pardon from Pope Leone X Medici in Rome, where he died in 1522.