Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder, also known as Portrait of a Youth with a Medal, is a tempera painting by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. The painting features a young man displaying in triangled hands a medal stamped with the likeness of Cosimo de' Medici. The identity of the young man has been a long-enduring mystery. Completed in approximately 1475, it is on display in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence. Central to the painting, seated before a landscape, is a young man with a medal between his hands. The man gazes out into the audience, while the medal... displays the profiled likeness of Cosimo de' Medici. The medal is a pastiglia imitation of a real metal medal, made of gilded gesso and inset into the portrait. As the medal is not reversed, evidently Botticelli either had access to the original mold or made a cast from the medal to produce his gesso. The medal seems to date to the latter half of the 1460s. The portrait is remarkable in part for the orientation of its subject.
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