Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici

This Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici from circa 1479 at the National Gallery of Art was likely painted as a memorial after Giuliano's assassination in the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478—the traumatic event in which the twenty-four-year-old Lorenzo's brother was stabbed nineteen times in the Florence Cathedral during High Mass. Multiple versions of this portrait exist in different collections, suggesting that demand for memorials of the murdered young Medici was substantial. Botticelli's rendering captures Giuliano's characteristic profile with the directness of a remembered face rather than a sitting subject, the soft natural features given a posthumous gravity by the circumstances of their recording.

The profile portrait renders Giuliano with idealized elegance appropriate to a memorial image, the closed eyes and door in the background perhaps symbolizing death, while Botticelli's refined line preserves the prince's noble features.