Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro

In 1450, at a tournament, a lance shattered Federico da Montefeltro's face. He lost his right eye and the bridge of his nose, and from then on he was almost always shown from his left side. That is why Piero della Francesca painted him here in strict profile, the good side turned toward us, the broken ridge of the nose left as it was rather than smoothed away. Federico ruled Urbino, a small hill state, and made a fortune as a mercenary commander whose word could be trusted, which in that century was rare enough to be worth real money. He faces his wife, Battista Sforza, on a matching panel. The two portraits were once hinged together like a book. She looks unusually pale. By the time the pair was finished, around 1474, Battista had died in her twenties after the birth of their son, and Piero seems to have worked partly from a death mask or an earlier likeness. Behind both of them the land rolls away in tiny fields and rivers, the actual territory they governed, seen from an imaginary height. On the reverse sides Piero added the couple riding in triumphal carts, so the whole object could be turned over and read like the pages of a book.