Der Hofnarr Gonella

For a long time nobody knew who painted this. Between the wars it was filed under a follower of van Eyck, and only in 1974 did the scholar Otto Pächt connect it to the Frenchman Jean Fouquet, on the strength of how closely the modelling matched Fouquet's known portraits. The sitter is easier to place. He is Pietro Gonella, the court fool of the Este dukes who ruled Ferrara, painted with the same unblinking care a painter would give a prince. A 1659 inventory of an Austrian archduke's collection describes him just as you see him, a man with a short beard in a red cap and red-and-yellow clothes.