Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli, called Fiorentino was a medalist born in Florence in 1430, where he died in 1514. Descendant of a family of goldsmiths worked mainly in Florence in the last decades of the century XV, but also visited the Flanders and was engraver of seals to the court of Burgundy.
The sitter for this medal is identified by an inscription: she is Giovanna degli Albizzi (1468-1488), wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni. The medal was commissioned for the marriage of the couple in the summer of 1486.
The medal is one of nearly twenty existing portrait medals of young women attributed to Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli, who immortalised the city's elite in ennobling profile and costly bronze. It exemplifies Florentine medallic portraits of women toward the end of the fifteenth century. Complementing the lovely visage of the sitter, Giovanna also appears in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco of the Visitation in the Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa Maria Novella and in a panel portrait, now in Madrid.
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