Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro

Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro, painted around 1488 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a double portrait of Francesco Sassetti—general manager of the Medici bank—and his youngest son. Ghirlandaio was the favoured portrait painter of the Florentine merchant and banking class, and his portraits of this group are among the most revealing documents of the social and psychological self-presentation of the quattrocento elite. The father-son format had a specific message: the continuity of a family and its values across generations. Sassetti was a humanist patron who commissioned Ghirlandaio's major fresco cycle in Santa Trinita.

Ghirlandaio places the two figures in three-quarter view against a parapet with a landscape beyond—the northern European portrait format he had absorbed and adapted to Florentine taste. The age contrast between the bearded father and the young son is rendered with psychological clarity, and the hands—often considered a test of portraiture skill—are given careful attention.