Retrato do bispo Bernardo de' Rossi

Lorenzo Lotto painted this bishop in 1505 in the northern Italian town of Treviso, where Bernardo de' Rossi had just taken up his see. Lotto was in his mid-twenties and looking hard: the reddish skin, the pouches under the alert blue eyes, the small blemishes are all set down with a Northern, almost Flemish exactness rare in Italian portraits of the time. The panel did not hang open as we see it now. It came with a painted lid that covered the face, an allegory of virtue and vice now in Washington, so the sitter was literally kept behind a moralising cover. When de' Rossi fled Treviso for Parma in 1524, the portrait went with him, and from there it passed into the great Farnese collection that was eventually carried south to Naples.