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fig. 52 Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Portrait of Alchitrof, no. 70.
fig. 53 Portrait of Alchitrof. Paper on wood, 13.8 × 10.9 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (GG 5198)
on Dawit in Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium of 1554, although it includes no images, opens with the endorsement that the Ethiopian priests at the church and hospice of Santo Stefano dei Mori or degli Abissini in Rome—who may or may not have known what their ruler looked like— all agreed that this painting represented the true image of their ruler.51 This formulation is often a rhetorical device, allowing an image to assert its meanings “as if” it represented observed realities; it does not necessarily mean that the image was a genuine likeness. In terms of the genesis of the painting, maybe the embassy returning from Ethiopia brought with it some prior image of Dawit that was later transformed into Giovio’s Europeanized portrait in oil. The image can be dated to 1532 by the inscription. It portrays Dawit in three-quarter length, in European clothes, with a long thin nose and curly hair, a moustache and a beard, wearing an earring and a ring on his finger,
and carrying an Ethiopian hand cross in his right hand, from the bottom of which hangs a piece of fine white cloth. In the Elogia, Giovio describes how the rulers of Ethiopia when in public covered their faces with a handkerchief of fine silk and carried a cross in their right hand.52 Giovio also penned a textual description of Dawit in another book, adverting to the color of his face (“like that of a quince roasted over ashes”) and his hair, and this “fixed” the physiognomy of the ruler of Ethiopia for his European readers.53 Finally, the 1575 edition of Giovio’s Elogia included both texts and images, and a print of Dawit (no. 72), based on Giovio’s original painting, was circulated widely to readers across Europe. Other collectors, most notably European rulers such as Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol,54 commissioned copies of these portraits of foreign rulers in order to have a pictorial record of “exotic” potentates, visually complementing the exotic and