Portrait of Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere

Pedro Berruguete, a Castilian who spent a decade in Italy during the 1470s and 1480s, painted Sixtus IV della Rovere from life while he was in Rome — the pope who rebuilt much of the city, founded the Vatican Library and gave his name to the Sistine Chapel. The portrait is one of the defining papal images of the Renaissance, and it reached Cleveland by way of the collection of James Jackson Jarves, the American critic and one of the first to assemble a collection of early Italian painting. Berruguete himself went on to work for the court of Urbino and then as a painter to the Catholic Monarchs in Spain, and his Italian years are the least documented part of his career. The panel, painted about 1476 to 1482, entered the Museum in 1916 with the Holden Collection. The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.