Portrait of a Magistrate

tuscan school

The compositional arrangement of this portrait allows us to connect it to more famous models by Bronzino; at the same time, the rendering of the subject and the ingenuity of several aspects of the artist’s approach suggest that it may be an older work. The toga allows us to identify the man as a magistrate; he holds a letter in his hand, on which we can read several words whose interpretation is problematic

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this work remains unknown to this day. Its presence in the Borghese collection is first documented in the Fideicommissari of 1833, where it was listed as a work by Bronzino. This attribution was later rejected by Giovanni Morelli, who, in 1890, favoured the Tuscan painter Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo. A thesis subsequently supported by Adolfo Venturi (1893).

While, Frederick Mortimer Clapp (1916) acknowledged that the deteriorated condition of the painting and the extensive overpainting had significantly altered the original work, he nonetheless discerned the hand of Pontormo, dating the portrait to between 1538 and 1543.

In 1959, Paola Della Pergola identified the painting as the work of an “early sixteenth-century Tuscan master”, drawing in part on the observations of Roberto Longhi who, in 1928, commenting on the quality of the execution, had proposed that the panel was “an imitation of a finer and older portrait, commissioned and executed at a later date, as was customary in Florence in the time of Cristofano dell’Altissimo.” The latter artist was known for having reproduced a large number of portraits from Paolo Giovio’s celebrated collection. To date, Longhi’s hypothesis remains the most compelling proposal concerning the issue of attribution. In this regard, Costamagna (1994) referred more broadly to the “Florentine school.”

Regarding the identity of the sitter, the presence of a toga suggests that he may have been a magistrate. According to Venturi (1893) and Jahn Rusconi (1906), the portrait was not painted from life, but instead based on a death mask or secondary drawings. Clapp (1916, p. 154), by contrast, emphasised a Morellian detail concerning the sitter’s hands, which he noted resembled those in another portrait attributed to Pontormo (Portrait of a Florentine Gentleman, Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova, inv. PB262), although this work has subsequently been attributed to Jacopino del Conte, Carlo Portelli, and Giorgio Vasari.

Antonio Iommelli