Portrait of Pope Paul II Barbo (obverse) and (reverse) (c. 1468): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Pope Paul II Barbo (obverse) and (reverse) (c. 1468) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Cristoforo di Geremia (Italian, active 1456–76).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This medal is part of a series of four oval medals that celebrated Pope Paul II as the “Founder of Italian Peace.” Though his renewal of the Italian League in 1468, Paul aspired to maintain peace among the independent Italian states and evade foreign incursion. In previous years, infighting between Florence, Venice, Ferrara, Milan, Naples, and Bologna had left the peninsula vulnerable to Turkish invasion.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Pope Paul II Barbo (obverse) and (reverse)
• Date: c. 1468
• Creator attribution: Cristoforo di Geremia (Italian, active 1456–76)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 4.2 x 3.7 cm (1 5/8 x 1 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1984.16

A detail from the museum

Rediscovered with fervor in fifteenth-century Italy, profiles on ancient coins provided dignified models for portrait medals of Renaissance elites.

Collection credit

Gift of Kelvin Smith in memory of Kenall Kelley

Further reading listed by the museum

• Winter, Patrick M. de. “Recent Accessions of Italian Renaissance Decorative Arts, Part I: Incorporating Notes on the Sculptor Severo Da Ravenna.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 3 (March 1986): 74–138.
• Bergman, Robert P., Diane DeGrazia, and Stephen N. Fliegel. Vatican Treasures: Early Christian, Renaissance, and Baroque Art from the Papal Collections: An Exhibition in Honor of the Sesquicentenary of the Diocese of Cleveland. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.