Restored in 2004 with Save Venice general funds.

The art collector and founder of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Vittorio Cini, purchased Pontormo’s portrait of Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s “On Friendship” in Florence in the early 1960s. He brought the painting back to Venice, where it now hangs in the Palazzo Cini Gallery near the church of San Vio in Dorsoduro.

This double portrait attests to the personal resonance of classical studies in the Renaissance. The two men hold a much-beloved passage from Cicero’s tract De Amicitia, or “On Friendship,” which exalts friendship over all other social obligations and relationships: “Friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way (De Amicitia, 6:22).” Although the identities of the two sitters are uncertain, this portrait may be that to which Vasari refers in his life of Pontormo, in which he describes a double portrait that the artist painted of two of his dearest friends.

The timely restoration of this panel, perhaps the greatest Florentine portrait in Venice, allowed the work to be one of the stars of the exhibition Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait, which was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from November 2004 to February 2005. More recently, the double portrait traveled to New York to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, The Medici: Portraits & Politics, 1512–1570, running from June to October of 2021.

The painting was restored by conservator Marina Nahabed, with the guidance of project director Giuseppe Pavanello of the Giorgio Cini Foundation.

For select projects, conservation dossiers in Italian containing limited textual and photographic documentation may be available for consultation by appointment at the Venice office of Save Venice and the Rosand Library & Study Center. For inquiries, please contact us at venice@savevenice.org.

Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo (1494–1557)
Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s “On Friendship”
1524, oil on wood panel
88.2 x 68 cm

Palazzo Cini Gallery: Homepage

Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence (Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

The Medici: Portraits & Politics, 1512–1570 (Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Strehlke, Carl Brandon and Elizabeth Cropper. Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Christiansen, Keith and Carlo Falciani, eds. The Medici: Portraits & Politics, 1512–1570. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press, 2021.