Formerly attributed to Bronzino (Calzi 1909), then to Santi di Tito (in the exhibition on Italian portraiture, Florence 1911) and finally to Alessandro Allori\u2019s circle (Casadei 1991), the portrait was correctly identified as being by the hand of Mirabello Cavalori by Alessandro Nesi (2009, pp. 274, 276 fig. 10, 278 note 19) on the basis of an unimpeachable stylistic comparison with other works by the artist.<\/p>\n
The young man, shown in a three-quarter half-bust pose, sports an elegant, tight black doublet decorated with small vertical slashes, and a large white ruff. He turns his direct and sober gaze, framed by sharp eyebrows, directly towards the observer. In his right hand he holds a bizarre-looking ring that has been identified as a key. Ring keys were already found in ancient Rome when, due to the absence of pockets, such items would hang on a string about their owner. The key ring shown here, however, has a symbolic significance. The young man wants to show us that he wishes and intends to open the heart of his beloved, the portrait\u2019s likely recipient, as though it were a jewel box. This learned and truly unique reference (we know of no other portraits containing such a detail) perfectly reflects the intellectual circles that Mirabello Cavalori frequented, a circumstance that also shines through in his paintings for Francesco de\u2019 Medici\u2019s Studiolo in Palazzo Vecchio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":7111,"template":"","tag-opera":[],"tecnica":[60],"class_list":["post-4710","opera","type-opera","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tecnica-oil-on-canvas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/4710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/opera"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/4710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"tag-opera","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tag-opera?post=4710"},{"taxonomy":"tecnica","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tecnica?post=4710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}