Portrait of Michelangelo Wearing a Turban

Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini was active in Florence during the height of activity of that city’s Renaissance. He was a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio, the scion of official Florentine taste, and Piero di Cosimo, a representative of its more eccentric aspects. In his youth, he was an assistant to Fra Bartolommeo and Mariotto Albertinelli.

Bugiardini did not limit his artistic studies to painting, but was a pupil also of the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni in the garden Academy sponsored by Lorenzo the Magnificent at the Medici villa at San Marco. It was there that he could have met Michelangelo, who became his lifelong friend. Michelangelo felt comfortable enough with Bugiardini to invite him to Rome in order to learn the art of painting buon fresco which Michelangelo needed in order to complete his commission to paint the Sistine ceiling. And it was Bugiardini who tended to the seriously ill Michelangelo in the summer and fall of 1531

The portrait represents Michelangelo at the age of 47.