The article proposes a philological reinterpretation of the bust of the 'Platonic youth' of the Bargello in Florence, a very famous bronze work in the history of Florentine Renaissance art which a long tradition of scholarly studies has attributed to the great Donatello.
The study aims to reveal the bust's authorship and the identity of the figure portrayed through a detailed examination of the work's collectionistic history, formal aspects and the complex symbolic device described by the medallion displayed by the person represented, depicting the Platonic allegory of the chariot of the soul.
Given the scope and complexity of the subject, the article addresses these questions in stages and from various angles, dividing the narrative into four basic sections. The first traces the history of the bust's ownership and its historiographical fortune, from its early appearance in the Byron Gallery Guardaroba of Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici to its final arrival in the Bargello, with a debated attribution to Donatello. The second involves a detailed analysis of the medallion and aims to illustrate its meaning and Donatellian origin. The analysis of this figurative document reveals the mystery of the work itself, allowing the sculpture to be understood in the broader context of Florentine disputes on matters of the soul and philosophical love, inspired by the passionate rediscovery in Florence of Plato's texts promoted by Cosimo the Elder and carried out by Marsilio Ficino. This is followed by a stylistic analysis of the bust, functional to the identification of its real author as Bertoldo di Giovanni, the Medici sculptor, pupil of Donatello and future custodian of the Giardino di San Marco. Considerations arising from an analysis of the medallion guide the final stages of the research, with a connected series of indications emerging from Florentine historical and literary sources helping to identify the person portrayed in the bust as Ficino's closest and dearest friend, the twenty-year-old philosopher Giovanni di Niccolò Cavalcanti.