Bulletin 22, 1973
Home
Français
Introduction
History
Annual Index
Author &
Subject
Credits
Contact
Bartolommeo
Veneto and His Portrait of a Lady This digital collection
was produced under contract to Canada's Digital Collections program,
Industry Canada.
by Creighton Gilbert
Pages 1 | 2 |
3 | 4
| 5 | 6
| 7 | 8 |
9
Notes
13 Giovanni Morelli, loc. cit.; E. Michalski, Zeitschrift für bildende
Kunst, vol. LXI (1927-1928), p. 280.
14 One of these, the Fitzwilliam portrait of
"The Labyrinth Man," was mentioned above; its stylistic date must be
about 1506-1508 in any case, and the strange costume may be explained as
a device of the Gonzaga, the family ruling Mantua, whose Marchioness was
by birth a member of the ruling Este family of Ferrara. The second is the
fine drawing in the Galleria Estense, Modena, where the bulk of the collection
comes, as its name implies, from the same Ferrarese ruling family.
The third is an unpublished portrait of a cardinal, identifiable as Cardinal
Ippolito d'Este by the coat of arms on the back. A copy of this, without
the coat of arms, has been published as a work of Lotto by Bernard Berenson,
Lorenzo Lotto (London: Phaidon Press, 1956), pl. 63.
15 One portrait of this group, the Houston Young Man, has a now indecipherable date that has been read both as 1512
and 1520. Though 1520 has been chosen more often, 1512 was the earlier
reading, and also seems preferable because in 1520 Bartolommeo was painting
works in an entirely different style, notably the dated Girl with
the Lute. If that gives a date for the group, a location in Padua can
be deduced from the portrait now in Budapest inscribed with the name,
city, and age of the sitter, Girolamo Dondi dell' Orologio of Padua, aged
twenty-four. It was wrongly attributed to Bartolommeo by Hevesy (loc.
cit.) and should instead be recognized as a poor copy of the Rome
portrait of this group. The face and even the costume folds are tracings,
while the hands and landscape have been redesigned. It is curious that
Hevesy linked it, rather shakily, to other works of Bartolommeo as of the
same sitter at a later date, and not to its direct prototype in Rome, Bartolommeo's
most famous work, which thus acquires a name for its sitter and a probable
place of execution.
Postscript
16 Usually the last record of Bartolommeo's life is thought to be of 1530
(apart from the erroneous reference to 1555 already discussed). This 1530
terminus is based on two paintings, the Mentmore Lady and the Portrait
of Lua vico Martinengo in the National Gallery,
London, both with inscriptions that have regularly been read as containing
that date. The latter picture shows the date in two lines, in the form
"MDXXX/XVI ZUN," which since Cavalcaselle first discussed it has
been read without argument as "June 16, 1530" until recently, in the National
Gallery's catalogue of sixteenth-century Venetian pictures, Cecil Gould proposed to read it "June,
1546" on the ground that the costume is in
a fashion worn at the latter date, of which he gives an excellent comparative
example. That would extend Bartolommeo's working life sixteen more years.
Yet the reading 1530 is a much better fit for a number of other kinds of
evidence; indeed it is remarkable how various elements, independent of
each other, all seem to lead us to 1530, and can only be re-read as 1546
by accepting the occurrence of distinctly less usual events. A very simple
element is that in this period, just as today, it is much less common to
give dates with the month and year only (as "June, 1546") than with the
day, month, and year (as in "June 16,1530"); thus the other eight dates
written by Bartolommeo on panels include none of the former style but two
of the latter. More weightily, there survive six other inscribed works
by Bartolommeo in the ten years 1520-1530, four with dates; it is obviously
easy to accept a seventh of 1530, but a strain on probability to suppose
that he then worked fifteen more years from which the surviving similarly
inscribed works are zero, followed by just one in the sixteenth year 1546. In addition, Bartolommeo constantly changed his style under eclectic influences
at intervals of five years or so, about five times up to 1530, when indeed
he was using the style in which he painted this portrait; it is very hard
to suppose, then, that when he was about fifty, he shifted his habits to
maintain one style for sixteen years, this picture being the sole evidence.
It is the odder that when we accept 1546, we have to accept these latter
alternatives cumulatively - he must have written the less common date form
and by accident all the late works are lost and he shifted his work patterns in middle age, the less likely option coming up right every time
- and it is stranger still that the series of more likely options we must
consistently reject do not merely diverge from 1546 but fit the same wrong answer, of 1530.
Historians do not like to exclude solutions that several independent
types of evidence support, and this is probably why Gould's point has been
greeted with doubt. (See the reaction of Bassi, in the entry in Dizionario
biografico degli Italiani, loc. cit.)
One certainly wants more data. Thus it was
most generous of Dr Camillo Boselli, at my request, to survey archival
and early printed sources in Brescia - the town fifty miles east of Milan
where the Martinengo were an active aristocratic family - to search for
the birth date of Ludovico, the sitter of this portrait. It is usual
to accept age of sitters as good evidence for dating their portraits, and
this sitter appears to modern observers about twenty or even less (an inscription
once added to the surface and now cleaned off said he was 26; it might
have been based on family records). Dr Boselli found four members of the family named Ludovico in the sixteenth century, all in the early part,
the two youngest being born in 1506 and 1509. The latter was assumed to
be the sitter by two recent contributors to the Storia di Brescia (Brescia:
1963-1964 [vol. II, pp. 312, 981]) with whom Boselli concurs. This
finding again gives the most natural kind of support to the date 1530, when
the sitter would be close to twenty just as we would have wished to find
him, and this time it is even difficult to find a strained explanation
to fit 1546. It is not plausible to propose a fifth Ludovico of whom no
records have survived; this was an important family, and for one of its
male adult members to appear in no records is as little possible as it
would be for a baronial family in Tudor England. One could suggest a posthumous
portrait; that is, if the sitter died at twenty, he could be painted at
that age later, in 1546. (It seems to be accepted that a man who died at
a more advanced age would not be commemorated with a portrait showing him
as he was at twenty.) But the posthumous portrait idea can be excluded
in the case of Ludovico born in 1509, who was still living in 1546. It
is barely possible for Ludovico born in 1506, who is last recorded alive
in 1534, and who died sometime between then and a record of his widow
in 1568. Our portrait could then be a posthumous portrait in 1546 of this Ludovico, if we suggest that he died in the earliest of the thirty-four
possible years, and also take it that he is meant to look twenty-eight,
contrary to our visual impression, and if we add this to our other series of
less likely but adopted options. This chain of less likely or almost unbelievable
circumstances which we must accept will recall the type of "unfair" detective story, in which the author's explanation, through improbable coincidences
etc., serves to prevent readers from solving the puzzle. On the other hand,
if any part of the less likely series is disallowed, the painting is of 1530.
To all this of course there is the proper answer that improbabilities must be accepted because the wearing of a 1546 fashion
in 1530 is an impossibility. And yet it seems to me that we cannot be quite
so confident about the close dating of costumes, even though this is a
helpful technical aid in art history which Mrs Newton's own work has much advanced by making a great collection of dated paintings. The inexactitude
comes in as the costumes compared are not identical but simply similar,
to an extent which is as debatable as the other kinds of evidence, so
that the close dating also must be left a little flexible. Mrs Newton,
thus, in the Ottawa portrait, is rightly careful to offer a five-year span
for the costume element she considers most helpful (i.e., most subject
to change) and notes that five years earlier still an "early form of the
type" is found. We need only hypothesize a matching "late form" five
years after it, or the appearance of the form prior to dated examples of it, or delays in fashions reaching other regions, or a costume element
less helpful because less rapidly changed - all unstrained possibilities - or a combination of some of these factors each accounting for a part of
the time spread, to arrive at a sixteen year wearing period for Ludovico
Martinengo's type of suit, and it would then not require us to vote for
the other improbable circumstances. (I am much indebted to Mr
Gould for discussing these factors with me.)
Next Page | Note
17
1 | 2 | 3 |
4
| 5 | 6
| 7 | 8 |
9
Annual
Index | Author
& Subject | Credits | Contact
"Digital
Collections Program, Copyright
© National Gallery of
Canada 2001"