The Bentivoglio diptych by Ercole de' Roberti: a masterpiece of Renaissance portraiture

The Bentivoglio diptych, preserved at the National Gallery in Washington, can be seen until June 19 at the exhibition "Renaissance in Ferrara. Ercole de’ Roberti and Lorenzo Costa," curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Michele Danieli.

A pair of elegant gentlemen, painted in profile on two poplar panels, stand facing each other with an austere gaze, against the background of a turreted city that opens beyond a window covered by a large dark curtain, the flaps of which we see in the two paintings. They are the lords of Bologna: Giovanni II Bentivoglio and Ginevra Sforza, portrayed in a sumptuous diptych by Ercole de’ Roberti (Ferrara, c. 1451 - 1496) now in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, as part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection. When Ercole painted the effigies of the de facto lords of the city (obviously Bologna is the one to be admired in the painting), he was a young man of not even twenty-five, who had recently moved to Bologna in the retinue of his master, Francesco del Cossa (Ferrara, 1436 - Bologna, 1478), to help him with the undertaking of the Griffoni Polyptych: Cossa was already an artist of very clear renown, while Ercole one of the most promising young men in Italy, and he probably did not have to work hard to get himself noticed by Giovanni II, who in 1463, at the age of 20, had been elected gonfalonier of justice by the city senate and could thus begin to exercise his de facto lordship over the city. The following year, his marriage to Ginevra Sforza guaranteed him the support of Milan: Ginevra (who had been the wife of Giovanni’s cousin, Sante Bentivoglio, his predecessor in the office of gonfaloniere) was in fact the niece of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan.

Giovanni II is remembered for being the architect of the renewal of Bologna during the Renaissance, by which he managed to secure popular support while placing the city’s magistracies under his control, giving rise to what took on the contours of a larval tyranny: one recalls, in particular, his intense patronage work that revitalized the arts in Bologna (one of the last cities in northern Italy to be affected by Renaissance innovations, but it soon came up to date with the arrival of Niccolò dell’Arca, Francesco del Cossa, Ercole de’ Roberti, Lorenzo Costa, and with the works of local artists such as Francesco Francia and Amico Aspertini), the enhancement of the city’s athenaeum, munificence towards the population, and the many years of relative peace obtained thanks to his military strength and a shrewd and intelligent diplomatic policy that had enabled him to obtain important alliances, above all that with the Milanese. The situation, after forty years of rule, undermined toward the end of the century by internal crises (above all the conspiracy of the Malvezzi in 1488 and that of the Marescotti in 1495, rival families of the Bentivoglio, who tried to oust John II, failed, and had to suffer violent repression: it happened especially after the Marescotti conspiracy, when the lord unleashed summary justice that began to sour his relationship with the population) and from an unfavorable economic situation, began to precipitate after the French conquest of Milan: having lost Sforza support, Bologna had become the object of the aims of Pope Julius II, who since his election to the papal throne in 1503 had cultivated a desire to subject the city to thepapal authority, to which it had rebelled by ousting the Papal Legate in 1401 and then a second time in 1438, after papal authority had succeeded in reestablishing its power three years earlier. It took the pope, for whom Bologna was crucial to the Papal State’s expansionism in Romagna, three years of preparations to move against Bologna: John II refused negotiations (he had also allowed himself to be persuaded by favorable astrological predictions, and had even had Luca Gaurico, the only astrologer who had predicted an inauspicious fate for him, tortured), convinced that he would find the support of the French (which did not come, just as the hoped-for help from the Republic of Venice did not arrive), but in the end he found himself alone before the papal army, and with even a condemnation on his person and the threat of interdict to the entire city. Aware that he would lose an eventual war, he eventually accepted Julius II’s final offer: he handed Bologna over to the Papal States and left the city along with his entire family, on the condition that he could keep his property. It was the night between November 1 and 2, 1506. In the following months, John II would again try the diplomatic route to return to Bologna in a private capacity, only to see his city again: he failed, and ended his days in exile in Milan in 1508.

When Ercole de’ Roberti was painting his portrait, however, John II could not have known all this: at the time he was still the splendid young lord of a city he was building in his own image. In the painting, the Ferrara painter depicts him with a haughty appearance. His very pale skin, with only some slight redness, contrasts sharply with the somber, midnight-blue curtain behind him, his hazel eyes, and his brown hair with auburn highlights, straight that looks as if it has just been tiled, and combed according to the mop that was fashionable at the time in northern Italy. The face is brought alive by a crease that starts at the nose and reaches the corner of the mouth, accentuating the gentleman’s expressiveness. On his head, a red cap, wearing a tunic of precious damask fabric with golden leaves on a brown background, and a collar lined with gray fabric, which allows a glimpse of a gray and red robe. In the background, as mentioned, is the city of Bologna silhouetted against a crystal clear sky, in the distance the mountains on which a light mist can be glimpsed.

More elaborate is the attire of Ginevra Sforza, who like her husband is painted from the waist up. She, too, is fair-skinned, even more so than her husband’s; the tones are those of ivory, but her face is enlivened by the blush of her cheek. Brown eyes look ahead, far away. The profile is that of a self-confident noblewoman: small nose, tight peach-colored mouth, high forehead covered by a transparent veil, with blond hair combed back, according to the fashion of the time, and covered in turn by a translucent silk veil that falls to her shoulders. A hairstyle similar to that sported by Barbara of Brandenburg in the Bridal Chamber frescoed a few years earlier by Andrea Mantegna in Mantua. Ginevra wears a brown gown trimmed with inserts of mustard-colored fabric, pleated at the elbow, on which are sewn precious gems: alternating rubies, sapphires, and pearls gathered in groups of four arranged in a rhombus. At breast height, a scarlet-red cloth belt edged with pearls. At the neck, a double string of pearls. And as with her husband, the window gives a glimpse of the city’s towers.

Ercole de’ Roberti’s is not the only known image of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, of whom we know of numerous portraits: he is, indeed, one of the Renaissance lords of whom we count the most depictions, although the diptych of Ercole de’ Roberti is probably the oldest painting, or at any rate the one that returns him to us with the youngest appearance. Nor is it the only work by Ercole de’ Roberti that depicts him: in Bologna, at Palazzo Poggi, there is a well-known portrait of John II, datable to about 1485, which, however, unlike the Washington diptych, has arrived to us decidedly ruined. Interestingly, the portrait in Palazzo Poggi was attributed to Hercules by Roberto Longhi, who also had it cleaned up at his own expense. And again Palazzo Poggi holds a medal by Sperandio Savelli, with a portrait of John II in profile, probably struck as soon as John II became gonfalonier of justice. Again, Lorenzo Costa portrayed John II on at least three occasions: in the Pala Bentivoglio, now in Bologna in San Giacomo Maggiore, and then inside the same church in the frescoes of the Bentivoglio Chapel together with his son Annibale, and in a famous portrait housed in the Uffizi, where the gentleman is depicted at the age of about fifty. As for Ginevra, we also know of a medal for her, designed by Antonio Marescotti; she, too, of course, is depicted in the Pala Bentivoglio, nor is her likeness missing from the frescoes in the chapel inside the church of San Giacomo Maggiore.

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For the diptych now in Washington, Ercole de’ Roberti could not fail to take into account the most illustrious precedent: the double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza, a masterpiece by Piero della Francesca now in the Uffizi, which was undoubtedly the main point of reference for his pair of portraits (moreover, Ginevra and Battista were half-sisters). Piero’s works are in all likelihood the earliest known examples in Italy of portraits set against a landscape inspired by Nordic painting counterparts, and Ercole de’ Roberti could not fail to take them into account, although here he achieves a high degree of originality. Innovative is the idea of arranging the two gentlemen in front of a window partially covered by a dark curtain: “this solution,” wrote Michele Danieli in the catalog of the exhibition Rinascimento a Ferrara. Ercole de’ Roberti and Lorenzo Costa, the 2023 double monograph devoted to the two great painters, “isolates the very pure, geometric yet living profiles,” which show a particular skill of Ercole’s, that of knowing how to combine, as Mario Salmi wrote in 1966, “sublime stylistic abstractions with the precision of human characters.”

It was Roberto Longhi who had been the first to attribute the two paintings to Ercole de’ Roberti, just as he had first suggested a dating close to the Polittico Griffoni, around 1477, although on the occasion of the review Rinascimento a Ferrara, which further affirmed the centrality of the diptych in Roberti’s production, he proposed to anticipate it: “the critics,” Danieli explained, “are in agreement in recognizing the influence of Cossa and the similarities with the predella of the Griffoni polyptych, and for this very reason [...] it is believed that the chronology should be slightly higher than the circa 1475 that is commonly indicated.” The proposal to anticipate the chronology considered most plausible so far is motivated both by the proximity to the Bolognese polyptych and by the fact that it is precisely around 1474 that relations between the Bentivoglio and the two Ferrara artists are documented. Moreover, another reference to anchor the dating of the diptych could be the destroyed San Lazzaro Altarpiece, lost during World War II, when it was in Berlin: it is among the rare works by Hercules that can be dated with some margin of certainty, and it was probably painted between 1474 and 1475, that is, when the Canons Regular took possession of the church of San Lazzaro in Bologna and evidently wanted to adorn it with an altarpiece worthy of such a place. We know the work from the pictures, and under the throne of the Virgin we see appearing, Danieli writes again, “a magnificent landscape that surpasses the fragmentation of the Griffoni predella and also of the Bentivoglio portraits.”

Longhi based his attribution to Ercole de’ Roberti, which has never been disputed, on a number of elements, first among them “the almost astral indifference with which the portrait painter viewed his models, then the beautiful science in the passages of planes and the adamantine fracture in the folds of Ginevra’s candid faldette, so similar to the crystalline formations in the flying flap of the woman who rushes, desperate, to the center of the Vatican predella.” And then again, in Ginevra’s profile, “the insistent building in the round, in the forehead, in the eye sockets, even in the smooth hair and as if rounded,” or again “the landscape, here and there abraded by the first searing shadows, and the shape of Bologna, a little true, and a little deformed”, not far from the architectural fantasies of September at Palazzo Schifanoia, or those of the predella of the Griffoni Polyptych (the “Vatican predella” alluded to by Longhi, being preserved at the Pinacoteca Vaticana, and also exhibited at the 2023 exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti, to give rise to an intense comparison with the Bentivolesco diptych, along with other lofty examples of Roberti’s portraiture).

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In the double portrait, Giovanni II Bentivoglio and Ginevra Sforza intend to present themselves with a bearing and clothing that befits their status: that of first citizens of Bologna. A diptych that is thus a vivid image of the ambitions of the couple, who by that time had already laid the groundwork for lasting rule and were working to achieve even more recognition: in 1471 Giovanni had forged an important military alliance with the Duchy of Milan, even obtaining the post of captain of the Milanese army; in 1473 Pope Sixtus IV had confirmed his son Hannibal’s right to succeed his father as head of the college of the Sixteen Reformers (Bologna’s highest magistracy); and in 1478 he succeeded in arranging for Hannibal to marry Lucrezia d’Este, daughter of Ercole, Duke of Ferrara. The work therefore fell at an important historical moment for the family and for the personal power of John II: it is surprising, therefore, that nothing is known of the diptych’s ancient provenance.

In fact, the first news about the two portraits dates back only to 1870: they were bought that year on the Italian market (but the circumstances of the purchase are still obscure) by the Parisian collector Louis-Charles Timbal. Two years later they were sold to another collector, Gustave Dreyfus, and upon the latter’s death they were placed on the market by his heirs: so it was that in 1930 the entire Dreyfus collection was sold to the Duveen Brothers, one of the most important commercial galleries of the time, and finally in 1936 the two paintings were purchased by the American collector Samuel H. Kress, and they have remained in his collection ever since (Longhi, writing his remarks on the diptych in his 1934 Officina ferrarese , regretted that the Italian state had not yet managed to secure the two precious paintings: and in the end, unfortunately for Italy, they took the road to the United States). According to Michele Danieli, it is possible that the two portraits came from the sumptuous palace in which the Bentivoglio family resided before going into exile in 1506, and which was located in the area of today’s Via Zamboni and Via delle Belle Arti, on the site where the Teatro Comunale di Bologna stands today: the Bentivoglio mansion was sacked and razed to the ground in 1507 by the Bolognese, who were subdued by the Marescotti, who intended to erase the memory of the Bentivoglio family from the city. The episode of the destruction by damnatio memoriae of the palace is known as the “Guasto dei Bentivoglio,” and a couple of odonyms in the area (Via del Guasto and the Giardino del Guasto, which stands on the site where the palace’s garden once stood) recall the area on which the building stood. An eighteenth-century inventory, made public in 1988, mentions two portraits of the gentlemen at the University of Bologna, but it is not possible to know whether these are the two works now in Washington. The hypothesis that the two paintings flanked in ancient times the Madonna del Baraccano, a work in the Bolognese church of the same name, executed perhaps in the early fifteenth century and then restored by Francesco del Cossa in the years of the Bentivoglio seigniory, has since been definitively discarded: in Antonio Masini’s Bologna perlustrata , published in 1666, there is indeed mention of two portraits accompanying the sacred effigy, but the author was alluding to the portraits of the patrons featured in the fresco.

In short, we do not know where the two paintings were in ancient times, nor on what occasion they were executed, and most of their early history is completely unknown to us. On one aspect, however, there can be no doubt: as Roberto Longhi has written, “this is, without fail, after that of Piero, the most beautiful diptych portrait of the whole of the Italian 15th century.”

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