Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza

Art history has no shortage of diptych portraits, but few are as strange as this one—the Duchess in the Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza had been dead for a full year when it was painted. Now in the Uffizi, this double portrait was completed by Piero della Francesca sometime around 1472–1475.

On the left is Duchess Battista Sforza, her skin rendered in a pallor that barely belongs to the living—which is not stylistic: it is reality. She died of puerperal fever after childbirth at just 26. Duke Federico commissioned Piero to preserve her likeness permanently in paint, placed eternally alongside his own. That deliberately achieved calm of a living duke and his dead duchess seated side by side is one of the Renaissance’s deepest acts of mourning.

Duke Federico on the right has one of the most recognizable profiles of the Renaissance—the nose bridges sinking in the middle, a nose broken and rebuilt. He lost his right eye and part of his nose bridge in a jousting tournament. He subsequently had the nasal bone beside it filed down, giving his surviving left eye a wider field of vision to compensate. He chose to be depicted only in left profile from that point on, not out of vanity, but because the other side was no longer there.

Look to the reverse panels—this diptych is double-sided. On the backs are two triumphal chariots carrying the couple across sweeping Tuscan landscapes. Every detail is moral allegory: Virtues drive the coach, a helmet and books flank the Duke, and the goddess of Temperance sits beside the Duchess. Piero transformed a duchy’s declaration of power into a portable moral textbook.

The precise bird’s-eye terrain in both backgrounds has long fascinated geographers and historians—rendered in enough detail that modern researchers can cross-reference satellite maps and identify the actual topography around the Duchy of Urbino. Piero did not paint mythology. He painted the earth as it truly was.

ArtBuddy’s Tip: At the Uffizi, spend as much time with the reverse of this diptych as with the front. Those two triumphal chariots and the panoramic landscape are the second half of Piero’s sentence—the front shows how they lived, the back shows how they entered history.