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    Research Reports

    Center 44
    June 2023–May 2024

    Gloria de Liberali

    Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio in Words and Images 

    Antonio Marescotti, Ginevra Sforza, 1442-1507, Wife of GIovanni II Bentivoglio 1464, c. 1464, lead//Twice pierced, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1957.14.626

    This year, I focused on a group of three objects in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art that portray Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio (c. 1440–1507), wife of the de facto lord of 15th-century Bologna, Giovanni II Bentivoglio. As a Sforza by birth and a Bentivoglio by marriage, Ginevra enjoyed a status unlike that of most women of her time and participated actively in the political and cultural life of Bologna and beyond.

    Although she was widely celebrated by her contemporaries for her virtue and beauty, Ginevra’s reputation has suffered from centuries of damnatio memoriae following the expulsion of the Bentivoglios from Bologna in 1506. Unlike many of the records and objects surrounding her existence, which were scattered or lost when the Bentivoglio palace was destroyed and plundered, three portraits of Ginevra that were produced during her lifetime survive in the National Gallery’s collection: a lead medal (c. 1464) currently attributed to the Italian medalist Antonio Marescotti; a painted portrait (c. 1474/1477) by the Ferrarese artist Ercole de’ Roberti, which forms a diptych with that of her husband Giovanni; and an anonymous woodcut that accompanies her biography in a famous book of women’s lives, De plurimis claris selectisque Mulieribus (published April 1497, borders dated 1493), compiled by the Augustinian friar Giacomo Filippo Foresti.

    Shown from the waist up, a pale-skinned woman wearing a jeweled dress faces our left in profile in this vertical portrait painting. She looks into the distance with the light brown eye we can see, under a faint, arched brow. She has a petite nose, smooth, lightly flushed cheeks, and her peach-colored lips are closed. Her rust-brown gown is trimmed with wide, mustard-yellow panels studded with pearls, rubies, and sapphires along the front of the bodice and down the sleeve we can see. The elbow of that sleeve, near the bottom edge of the painting, is gathered in intricate, narrow pleats. White fabric billows out from the seam where the sleeve meets her shoulder, and a wide scarlet-red belt bordered with pearls wraps around her waist. Her blond hair is pulled back and coiled into a horn over her ear. Her head is covered with a translucent white veil that falls in deep folds to her shoulder. Another sheer veil layered over the first sweeps down over the high hairline of her forehead. A double strand of white pearls encircles her neck above the white collar of her gown. A marine-blue cloth with an olive-green lining nearly fills the background beyond her, but a sliver of a landscape view can be seen along the left edge of the composition. The window opens onto a town with coral-red city walls in front of blue and gray buildings. Hazy blue mountains line the horizon in the deep distance, and the sky above deepens from pale, ice blue over the mountains to topaz blue across the top.

    Ercole de' Roberti, Ginevra Bentivoglio, c. 1474/1477, tempera on poplar panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.220

    My research shows that the first object was likely created around the time of Ginevra’s first marriage to Sante Bentivoglio (1454) and celebrated her as a prince-worthy bride. This medal also invited questions of provenance as well as of its relationship to other surviving exemplars, which were only partially answered. I also reinscribe Roberti’s painting—traditionally discussed in terms of artistic rivalry with Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro diptych (Uffizi, Florence)—within a Sforza dynastic portraiture tradition that frames Ginevra as consort ruler of Bologna. Ginevra’s roles as Christian matron and female exemplum are centered in the words and images used to describe and portray her in Foresti’s De plurimis claris. 

    In fall 2024, Gloria de Liberali’s research will appear in The Medal journal. At that time, she will also begin a new position as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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