Altobello Melone

The most reproduced likeness of Cesare Borgia, the soldier son of Pope Alexander VI, is a small panel in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and nobody has been able to prove that it shows him. It was painted around 1513 by Altobello Melone. The Borgia name came attached to the picture from a 19th-century Bergamo collection, the gallery now catalogues it as the portrait of a gentleman, and Cesare Borgia had been dead six years by the likely date of the paint.

Melone was born in Cremona, in Lombardy, about 1491, the year implied by a document of 1513 that records him as over 22. The city stood where northern engravings, Venetian colour and Ferrarese painting all arrived at once, and he took from all three. The Venetian collector Marcantonio Michiel, who kept notes on pictures he saw in private houses, called him a pupil of Romanino, the leading painter of nearby Brescia.

In December 1516 the officials running the building works at Cremona Cathedral hired him to fresco the nave, and the contract required his scenes to surpass those Boccaccio Boccaccino had just finished on the same walls. He delivered the Flight into Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents, then scenes of the Passion, working there into 1518. After 1520 the records thin out. He was dead by 3 May 1543, and which of the late pictures are his is still argued over.