Ronchey, S. “Il volto giovanile di Bessarione.” Le rotte dei misteri. La cultura mediterranea da Dioniso al Crocifisso. Atti del Convegno. (4-5 November 2005). Ed. L. De Simone. Panzano in Chianti (Florence): Edizioni Feeria, 2008.

This illustrated study investigates the presumptive representations of the young Bessarion, which appear in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, portraying the thirty year old intellectual and diplomat in his attire as Byzantine ecclesiastical delegate to the Council of Ferrara-Florence of 1438-39.  While the physiognomy of the portrayal is consistent with that of the four most credible representations of Bessarion’s later years – those of Paolo Romano, Gioacchino de Gigantibus, Pedro Berruguete and, most probably, Justus van Gent — the crucial question of the iconographic source used by Piero, who painted the young Byzantine delegate twenty years after the Florentine Council, is the subject of this investigation.  Locating the possible model Piero must have drawn on in sketches made by Pisanello in August 1438 at Ferrara, this investigation opens the way to further questions concerning the commission of the Urbino painting.  Beyond the various conjectures, the historical and prosopographical investigation aims to identify the most reliable physiognomic characteristics in the representations of the Bessarion pictus, which have been generally unacknowledged.