Bernardino de' Conti

Bernardino de' Conti spent his career in the long shadow of one man. He was among the leading portrait painters of Milan around 1500, the years when Leonardo da Vinci was living in the city and remaking what a painted face could do. De' Conti absorbed that lesson closely, the soft modelling and quiet gravity of a Leonardo sitter, and turned it into portraits for Milan's ruling families, the Trivulzio and the Sforza among them.

He came from the countryside near Varese and settled in Milan in the 1490s. His portraits are careful and restrained, and so close to his master's manner that they have caused confusion ever since. The connoisseur Bernard Berenson once proposed that the celebrated Belle Ferronnière in the Louvre, long given to Leonardo, was really de' Conti's work, a claim few accept but one that shows how thin the line could be.

Later in life he seems to have followed the pull of French patronage northward. His dated portraits run from about 1508 to 1522, a steady record of the faces that mattered in Milan and beyond.