Francesco d’Este (born ca. 1429, died after 1486)

Rogier van der Weyden was the most celebrated painter of the Burgundian court and the dominant figure in Netherlandish art before Memling. This portrait of Francesco d’Este, the young son of the Marquis of Ferrara who was raised at the Burgundian court, belongs to the artist’s final decade, when he had largely given up large altarpieces for a sequence of refined court portraits. Van der Weyden’s aristocratic sitters set the standard for European portraiture for a century, prized for their grave dignity and the crystalline precision of the Flemish technique.