Portrait of Alfonso I d'Este

This now-lost portrait of Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, was painted around 1523 by Titian as a companion piece to his portrait of Alfonso's mistress Laura Dianti. It showed the duke with his right hand resting on the muzzle of a cannon and his left on the hilt of his sword, an image of military strength painted at a tense moment in Ferrara's relations with the papacy; Michelangelo is recorded admiring the original during a visit to Ferrara in 1529. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V later acquired the painting, which was kept in Bologna before being brought to Spain, where it is recorded in the royal inventories in Madrid between 1666 and 1686 before disappearing sometime in the eighteenth century. The composition is known today only through copies, including versions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and a private collection in Dijon. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/