Attributed to Jacopino del Conte

The man seated with a book in his hands became pope in 1555 as Marcellus II and died 21 days later. Marcello Cervini was a Tuscan nobleman from Montepulciano, a humanist and a collector of books, and the composer Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli carries his name.

For centuries nobody knew who he was. The Borghese inventory of 1693 called the panel a Raphael, and only in 1893 did the scholar Adolfo Venturi identify the sitter from a coat of arms in the wood panelling, a bundle of ears of corn for the Spannocchi family. Candidates for the painter ran through Perino del Vaga, Pontormo, Francesco Salviati and Marcello Venusti until Hermann Voss and Iris Cheney settled on Jacopino del Conte in the 1950s. Jacopino, a Florentine trained under Andrea del Sarto, spent most of his long career in Rome and was above all a portrait painter. Attributed to leaves a margin of doubt. The Galleria Borghese dates the portrait to around 1540, and an Anatolian carpet of the Ushak type, often called a Lotto carpet, is part of the setting.