Alchitrof, Emperor of Ethiopia

This is one of the stranger faces in the series, because the man in it may never have existed. Labelled the emperor of Ethiopia, Alchitrof appears in no Ethiopian list of kings, and the feathered cloak and the rings pierced through his lip match nothing known of the country in the 1500s. He looks instead like Europe's idea of a distant, half-legendary ruler, assembled from rumour and imagination for a gallery that wanted the whole world's famous men on its walls. One historian has suggested the odd name is a garbling of a real prince, a son of the Ethiopian king Lebna Dengel. The parrot perched on his hand is the surest sign that no one here was painting from life.