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If Paolo Giovio, creator of the renowned 16th-century Museo dei Ritratti, a portrait collection of the most celebrated people, both in his own and in bygone times, had not died in 1552 but had lived on to the 1580's, we might have expected a counterfeit of the Polish poet Jan Kochanowski to be among the 350 other portraits we know about today that were housed in the gallery of his Renaissance mansion at Como.
No doubt the ranks of the Poles, represented in the collection by Jan Tarnowski, King Sigismundus I and Filippo Buonaccorsi "Callimachus" (side by side with their Central European colleagues, the Kings of Hungary Matthias Corvinus and Louis the Jagiellonian, and the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Vasili III) would have been augmented by the images of two more illustrious Kings of Poland, Sigismundus Augustus (son of Sigismundus I and the Italian princess, Bona Sforza d'Aragona), and Stephen Báthory; and further by at least two Polish men of letters and learning: Copernicus (whom Bruno Nardi has identified in the figure of the young man seated on the left-hand side of Ptolemy and Al-Battani in Giorgione's famous painting, I Tre Filosofi), and secondly, the greatest Slavonic poet right up to the Romantics — Jan Kochanowski.
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