Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Leonello d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara
Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) Italian
Not on view
Obverse: Leonello was aware that different portraitists might record and arrange his features differently. Pisanello, his favored artist, turned his sitter’s curly mop of hair into a leonine mane – a play on Leonello’s name (‘Little Lion’) and a physiognomical reference to the rulership of the king of the beasts.
Reverse: Pisanello’s 1444 medal of Leonello commemorates his highly strategic second marriage to Maria of Aragon, an illegitimate daughter of the king of Naples. A song or poem made tangible and permanent, it represents Leonello as a lion learning the music of love from Cupid himself.
