Giovanni II Bentivoglio

Ercole de' Roberti

National Gallery of Art

The head and chest of a clean-shaven, pale-skinned man is shown in profile facing our right, in front of a curtain opening onto a sliver of a distant landscape in this vertical portrait painting. The man’s eye we can see is hazel under a thin brow, and he has a straight nose over a closed, peach-colored mouth. A crease running from the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth is lightly shaded, and his cheek flushes light pink. His straight, auburn-brown hair is cut to angle from his brow down to his neck. He wears a tall scarlet-red cap and a brown and gold tunic pleated in vertical folds down the front. The tunic is patterned with stylized leaves and vines in gold against the brown background. The neckline is lined with smoke gray, and the high neck of a garment beneath is patterned with gray leaves against brick red. The marine-blue, nearly black, cloth behind him covers most of the background. A narrow view along the right edge of the composition opens onto a landscape with the ruins of a terracotta-colored gate and city wall closer to us, though still deep in the distance. Even farther back is a walled town with gray and pale peach towers and crenellated walls. Spires are silhouetted against azure-blue mountains, hazy along the horizon in the distance, under a pale, ice-blue sky.