# Angelo Poliziano [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [SPINELLI, Niccolò di Forzore]() - Date: 1451-1500 - Technique: Cast bronze, diameter 6 cm ## Commentary Angelo Poliziano c. 1494 Cast bronze, diameter 6 cm Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Angelo Poliziano \(1454-1494\) was a poet and philologist with strong Medici ties in late fifteenth-century Florence. Appointed tutor to Lorenzo de' Medici's eldest son, Piero, he is depicted ascending the stairs with three of Lorenzo's children in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco of the <a onclick="return OpenOther\('/html/g/ghirland/domenico/5sassett/frescoes/5confir4.html'\)" href="/html/g/ghirland/domenico/5sassett/frescoes/5confir4.html">Confirmation of the Rule</a> in the Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinità, Florence. He was among "the most learned men then to be found in Florence" whose portraits Giorgio Vasari identified in Ghirlandaio's fresco of <a onclick="return OpenOther\('/html/g/ghirland/domenico/6tornab/62tornab/1appear2.html'\)" href="/html/g/ghirland/domenico/6tornab/62tornab/1appear2.html">Angel Appearing to Zacharias</a> in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. On the obverse of the medal, Poliziano wears a collared tunic and a round cap over long hair. His aquiline nose and protruding lower lip may have suggested to contemporaries a flattering comparison with the <a onclick="return OpenOther\('/html/b/botticel/7portrai/14dante.html'\)" href="/html/b/botticel/7portrai/14dante.html">famed poet Dante.</a> The allegoric representation on the reverse shows an angel \(a play on the sitter's first name\) reaches into the tree's canopy with one hand and gives a bough to the female figure, probably Florence, who sits on a rock beneath the laurel tree. ## Related artworks - [Filippo Strozzi]() - [Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni]() - [Girolamo Savonarola]() - [Lorenzo de' Medici]() - [Portrait of Lodovico Luti of Siena]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()