Hand Painted Pendant "To Each His Own Mask" Ridolfo Ghiralandaio 1506

This is an extremely rare rendition that you won't find anywhere as a pendant. I found one in an antique store and had it copied by special artisans.  The Latin means " To each his own Mask"* This is a painting "cover" by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio in 1510* This pendant hangs from nephrite jade with complementary vintage Venetian beads.

*In 16th-century Europe, the idea of the portrait was anything but simplistic or trusting. It was an age of suspicion. Courtiers practised a pleasing mask to present to their prince. Princes were encouraged, by Machiavelli, to lie to their subjects. Religious division meant that dissimulating your faith might be essential to stay alive.

A painting that dates from about 1506, and is today attributed to Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, makes this anxiety explicit. The portrait is of an unnamed woman, sad, enigmatic; it has been variously called The Veiled Woman and The Nun.

But even more mysteriously, it comes with a "cover”, a painting designed to slip over it and conceal it. This false panel is painted with grotesque reliefs including, disturbingly, a humanoid, coloured mask with tight lips and black, empty eye-holes. In Latin, a painted inscription reads Sua cuique persona - “To each his own mask.”

To each his own mask. This is a long way from a simple notion of identity, of depiction. We present masks to the world and a portrait is a record not of a self, but a mask, a performance, in which subject and artist conspire. It is a fiction. It is not to be taken at face value.“