The monumental bronze sculpture, a dazzling archetype of absolute power, is marked by decorative classical armor, the subject's sinewy musculature and distant, riveting gaze. Though the portrait bust is no longer fully gilded, the subject's eyes are still silvered, and mesmerizing. The first gallery of paintings traces the evolution of portraiture in the years leading up to the reigns of Alessandro and Cosimo I. Such works as Jacopo da Pontormo's sober "Portrait of Two Friends" (c. 1523-24) anticipate, in their unvarnished naturalism, the aura of moral rectitude that would be reborn under the republic. An encomium to male friendship and to the values of a humanist Latin education, it includes a passage from Cicero's writings that speaks to republican virtues, and introduces here fascinating literary analogies that are threaded throughout the show. The fall of the city under the Spanish siege was no fault of its heroic citizens, whose efforts likely inspired Pontormo's "Portrait of a Halberdier" (c. 1528-30). Confidently posed before a shadowed fortress wall and looking calmly at us, the youthful subject holding a halberd—a traditional pole weapon topped with an ax—may have been emblematic of the city's valorous defense. One need only compare the icy elegance, virtuoso details and stylish refinement of the formally analogous "Portrait of a Young Man With a Book" (c. mid-1530s) by Pontormo's student, the poet and court painter to Cosimo I known as Bronzino, to grasp how quickly the tenor of the times would change. After the killing of Alessandro de' Medici (who is captured here in Pontormo's melancholic portrait of 1534-35), Cosimo I rose to power on the strength of his military prowess and arsenal of weaponry. As evidenced in a gallery devoted to his lineage and dynasty, portraits of the ducal family were intended to project and defend his power and authority, to assert the continuity of a new Medici dynasty, and to convey the cultural refinement of his court. Among such weighted works was Francesco Salviati's vividly painted "Giovanni dalle Bande Nere" (c. 1546-48), a fictive likeness of Cosimo's father painted long after the subject's death, and an embodiment of the idealized ancestry the young duke hoped to establish for himself. Once banished from Florence after accusations of murder, Bande Nere was a descendant of a secondary branch of the Medici family, and a mercenary soldier who died young in battle.