Novohispanic School. Mexico. 17th century. 'Portrait of Hernán Cortés' Oil on canvas. Relined. 64 x 48 cm. Portrait of Hernán Cortés based on the one sent by the conquistador to the Italian Renaissance humanist, physician, historian, biographer and prelate, Paulo Giovio, which served as a model for his portraits from the 16th century onwards. This would be the third portrait painted during Cortés' lifetime, which formed part of the gallery assembled by Paolo Giovio, bishop of Nocera (1483-1552), whose iconographic type was carefully described in 1864 by Valentín Carderera. According to what Giovio himself stated in his writings, it was sent to him by Cortés a few months before his death, which would help to date it to 1547, when he was 62 years old. The portrait was included in the gallery of illustrious men that Giovio had installed in the palace of Borgovico on the shores of Lake Como. Although the singular expressive power of this effigy and the intensity of his gaze have long been praised, it is in fact only an adaptation, painted from Weiditz's drawing, although the composition is inverted and reduced to a bust, so that Cortés turns his head to his right. His appearance was aged by greying his hair, beard and moustache and by lowering his eyes into their sockets to capture the wrinkles and bags under his eyelids. Giovio's portrait retained the Germanic cap and was used to make the engraving by Tobias Stummer (1539-1584) that illustrated the biography of Cortés in the Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium printed in 1575. The supposed original sent by Cortés to Giovio has been lost, but it is the source of many prints that reinterpret the one by Stummer and many of the bust portraits that were painted throughout the 17th and 18th centuries for iconographic series. Also based on this original portrait is the Portrait of Hernán Cortés in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes museum inSan Fernando (inv. 0031). In asection of the file on the painting, it briefly summarises the biography of Cortés, who is considered, to quote the historian Lafuente Ferrari, 'to be 'the most famous of the conquerors of the New World after Christopher Columbus'. From a noble family, he was born in Medellín (Badajoz) in 1485. In 1521 he conquered Mexico and the following year he was appointed governor and captain general of the kingdom of New Spain'.