Il poeta Raffaele Zovenzoni

The name on the museum label comes with a footnote. This head has been given at different times to Giovanni Bellini, to Antonello da Messina, and to Alvise Vivarini, and even the man in it is uncertain, read by some as the poet Raffaele Zovenzoni and by others as the painter Andrea Mantegna. What is clearer is the occasion. Around 1467 the emperor Frederick III crowned Zovenzoni, a scholar from Trieste, as poet laureate, and the sitter wears exactly the signs of that honour, a wreath of myrtle in his hair and plain antique dress in the manner old Rome kept for its poets. The sharp light picking the face out of the dark ground is the new Flemish way of painting, then just reaching Venice.