Portrait of Michelangelo, Jacob Bos

Exhibition Label: "Giorgio Vasari and Court Culture in Late Renaissance Italy," Sep-2012, Sally Cornelison and Susan Earle Dutch engraver Jacob Bos was a pupil of Italian printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi. This portrait of Michelangelo was the prototype for the smaller portrait at the top of Martino Rota’s print after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment displayed next to it. In Bos’s image, scroll motifs and an inscription frame the oval image of the bearded artist. The inscription reads: “Michelangelo Buonarroti Florentine Patrician at the Age of 75.” Although Vasari’s Life of Michelangelo recounts tales of the industrious intensity that during projects led Michelangelo to neglect his hygiene and appearance, when he wasn’t working Michelangelo was quite fastidious about his dress. He eschewed a lower-class artisan’s modest garb in favor of fashionable, aristocratic black garments cut from fine fabric. One of Michelangelo’s signature items of clothing was the black wool hat that appears in this and Rota’s portrait. It was an expensive accessory whose cost equaled a skilled worker’s earnings for one year.