Giovanni II Bentivoglio

Giovanni II Bentivoglio is shown in the strictest profile, a scarlet cap on his head and a brown tunic pleated in vertical folds and embroidered with gold foliage, the dark cloth behind him parted at the right edge to reveal a distant landscape of ruined walls, towers and blue mountains. He belonged to the family that governed Bologna in the last decades of the fifteenth century, and Ercole de’ Roberti (c. 1455/1456–1496), the greatest of the Ferrarese painters after Cosimo Tura, gives him the sharp, heraldic clarity that court portraiture in Ferrara made its own. The panel was painted about 1474 to 1477 and has a companion portrait of the sitter’s wife, Ginevra, in the same collection; together the two are among the finest surviving examples of the profile portrait used as an instrument of dynastic display. It is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.