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Lorenzo Merlini e
il Cosimo III di Villa Vitelli

A masterpiece of late seventeenth-century Florentine sculpture, the monumental Portrait of Cosimo III de’ Medici (1694; marble, h. 205 cm) is one of the earliest independent achievements of Lorenzo Merlini (1666–1745), a pupil of Giovanni Battista Foggini, and at the same time one of the outstanding masterpieces of his career. The Grand Duke is shown full-length, in antique dress and in an attitude of command: Merlini combines the celebratory rhetoric of the state portrait with striking physiognomic truth, achieving a highly personal synthesis of the ancient and the modern. Commissioned by Marquis Clemente Vitelli, the statue was installed in 1695 in the great hall of his villa at San Domenico in Fiesole, an exceptional setting for a grand-ducal portrait of such scale and ambition.