Ronchey, S. “Volti di Bessarione.” Vie per Bisanzio. VII Congresso Nazionale dell'Associazione di Studi Bizantini. Venezia, 25-28 November 2009. Eds. A. Babuin, A. Rigo, and M. Trizio. Edizioni di Pagina: Bari, 2013. 539-51.

Bessarion loved no one and nothing more than Venice and the Venetians. And yet in none of the milieux he frequented most often was he seen, or at least portrayed, more ruthlessly: the portrait, today in the National Gallery, London, painted by Gentile Bellini on the door of the “tabernacle” of the reliquary of the True Cross; the copy, painted by one of his late disciples, perhaps Giannetto Cordegliaghi, of another of his portraits, was consumed in a fire in 1546, portraying him with the same reliquary in his hand; and the monk in the Funerali di san Girolamo in Carpaccio’s telero in the Scuola degli Schiavoni, identified as Bessarion by Augusto Gentili. It is as if, in the Venetian portraits of Bessarion that have survived the strange curse which has seen so many destroyed or lost, a grotesque mask was superimposed on his handsome features, those of a true oriental Erasmus, conferred instead on his countenance and person by the painters who worked, almost all at the same, for the other courts which admired him: the papal court, which gives us the noble, as well as credible, profile sculpted from life by Paolo Romano on the funeral bas-relief of Pius II; the Court of Aragon in Naples, with the illuminated portrait by Gioacchino de Gigantibus for the Adversus calumniatorem Platonis manuscript; the Court of Urbino, which would have hosted him and his belongings if he had not died returning from his mission in France, and which has preserved two or three fundamental images of Bessarion: the portrait by Pedro Berruguete, the portrait attributed to Justus van Gent, and the one in mirror image of the profile found in the Aragonese manuscript, also painted around 1472 on the banner of the Confraternity of St. John the Baptist.