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Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) was a poet and philologist with strong Medici ties in late fifteenth-century Florence. Appointed tutor to Lorenzo de' Medici's eldest son, Piero, he is depicted ascending the stairs with three of Lorenzo's children in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco of the Confirmation of the Rule in the Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinità, Florence. He was among "the most learned men then to be found in Florence" whose portraits Giorgio Vasari identified in Ghirlandaio's fresco of Angel Appearing to Zacharias in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
On the obverse of the medal, Poliziano wears a collared tunic and a round cap over long hair. His aquiline nose and protruding lower lip may have suggested to contemporaries a flattering comparison with the famed poet Dante. The allegoric representation on the reverse shows an angel (a play on the sitter's first name) reaches into the tree's canopy with one hand and gives a bough to the female figure, probably Florence, who sits on a rock beneath the laurel tree.
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