Portrait of Petrarch

Attributed to da Santacroce Girolamo

(Santa Croce, ca. 1490 - Venice, 1556)

copy after Bonsignori Francesco

(Verona c. 1460 - Caldiero 1519)

The painting portrays the poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), whose figure is silhouetted in profile against the backdrop of a cloud-streaked sky. In the foreground, on a wooden cornice, appears his name: ‘Franciscus Petrarcha’. The painting is recorded in the Borghese collection starting with the 1693 inventory, described as being by an ‘uncertain’ artist, and it appears with the attribution to Holbein in later 18th- and 19th-century lists. The work is one of the many portrayals that confirm the 16th-century popularity of the poet, whose image became widespread through this iconography, as evidenced by the multiple copies known today. Probably derived from a lost prototype, attributed by some to Francesco Bonsignori, by others to Girolamo da Santacroce.

Object details

Commentary

In this portrait, the poet Francesco Petrarch is shown in profile, half-length, wearing a dark robe with a hood that leaves only his face uncovered. The figure is depicted behind a wooden cornice on which his name is written – allowing him to be clearly identified – and against the backdrop of a cloudy sky.

The painting, of unknown provenance, is documented in the Borghese collection starting with the 1693 inventory, where it is described as follows: ‘A painting of about a palm and a half in height with a portrait of a clothed Man with a Hood on his head with letters beneath saying franciscus Petrarcha in panel No. 522. Marked behind with gilt frame. Uncertain’.  In the subsequent list of 1790 and again in the fideicommissary list of 1833, the portrait is referred to as being by Holbein. At the end of the 19th century, Venturi (1893) assigned the small canvas to the school of Bellini, a reference that was generally accepted and subsequently endorsed by Longhi (1928) and Schmitt (1961, p. 134). A further specification was made by Berenson (1936; 1958), who put forward the name of Girolamo da Santacroce, a pupil of both Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. Della Pergola (1955) catalogued the painting as deriving from a prototype by Francesco Bonsignori in the National Gallery, London, stressing its similarity to a portrait in the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, drawing on the same source.

With the exception of Heinemann (1961), who put forward the name of Bernardino Licinio, subsequent critics have continued to waver between the names Francesco Bonsignori (Stefani 2000) and Girolamo da Santacroce; the latter was preferred by Stradiotti (1976), author of a reconstruction of the artist's life and oeuvre, as well as Reboldi (2011-2012) and Dal Pozzolo (2017).

The Borghese portrait – the genre of the portrait is an ancient one – is one of the many exemplars that confirm the popularity of the figure of the poet in the early 16th century, thanks especially to the Venetian scholar Pietro Bembo. In fact, at least a dozen copies deriving from the same prototype are known, distributed among museums and private collections (Heinemann, 1961; Dal Pozzolo, 2017).

Pier Ludovico Puddu