Portrait of Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini)

The man in this portrait is Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who became Pope Pius II in 1458, a poet and diplomat long before he was a pope. He spent his last years trying, and failing, to raise a crusade after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and he died in 1464 at Ancona, waiting for a fleet that never sailed. The face here is not painted from life. It descends from a portrait gallery the humanist Paolo Giovio assembled at his villa on Lake Como; around 1552 the Medici duke Cosimo the First sent the painter Cristofano dell'Altissimo to copy the entire set, and those copies were themselves copied again and again across Europe. This Basel canvas is one late descendant of that chain. It still carries the plain Latin label a viewer once needed, Pius II Pont Max, painted into the upper corner.