Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450–1850, Clark Art Institute, January 23 – March 27, 2011

We pass by a marble relief of a youth attributed to Baccio Bandinelli to enter the Italian Renaissance room, which not only contains some of the finest works in the exhibition, including a Portrait of a Girl Holding a Bouquet of Flowers (c. 1570-80), attributed variously to Girolamo Macchietti   (1535–1592) and Santi di Tito and the Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1564–70) securely given to Giovanni Battista Moroni (c. 1525–1578), but an important new addition to the oeuvre of Francesco Girolamo Mazzola, called Il Parmigianino 1503 – 1540), a Portrait of a Man dated around 1530, after the artist had been energetically and somewhat successfully working in Bologna. As a very young man, in 1524, he had left his native Parma for Rome, in order to finish his training and to pursue commissions at the Papal court. In those years following the death of Raphael and Pope Leo X, the grand commissions of the previous decade were no longer available for the numerous young artists in the city. Many of these, like Parmigianino, turned to smaller forms, prints and drawings for decorative artists, to supplement their income from the relatively small panel paintings in demand at the time. This milieu abruptly came to an end with the Sack of Rome in 1527. Many artists’ studios and works of art were destroyed. According to Vasari, Parmigianino was able to avoid disaster by putting on a display of frenetic work for the troops. He managed to cultivate good relations with the invaders, but soon enough he had to flee the city. He came to Bologna, where he could stay with a good friend, and set to work with a vengeance. He was especially prolific as a portraitist in Bologna, since it suited both local demand and the artist’s need for ready cash. He executed most of these portraits on panel, using a dark ground, from which he built up forms with highlights of white lead with skin tones of white lead mixed with pink flesh tones. A few, of which the important allegorical portrait of the Emperor Charles V is the prime example, were painted on canvas, using a warm, tawny shade as a ground layer. We know that the Charles V was painted in haste for his coronation as Emperor, it is possible that the canvas technique enabled Parmigianino to work faster. There were most likely economic reasons for the choice of medium as well. He executed this portrait with consistent finish throughout, a feature not always found in his panel paintings. For example, the hands and arms of the children in the pair of family portraits in the Prado are no more than sketched in with loose strokes of the brush, not that the paintings are any the worse for it.

Another important Emilian find is a signed portrait of a Young Man Holding a Palm (c. 1520–25) by Francesco Maria Rondani (Italian, 1490–1550). This is one of very few works attributed to this obscure but exceptional master, whose style partakes of both the examples of Correggio and or Parmigianino, as shown here by the luxuriant soft modelling of the flesh and the wild, romantic landscape.

A striking Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Lira da Braccio (c. 1510–20) is one of the more interesting puzzles posed in the exhibition, not least because of its unusual iconography, but also because it has so far eluded attribution. A young man looks downwards out of an unglazed opening, while holding a lira da braccio in his left hand and a bow in the right. He prominently wears a ring with a bright red stone on the forefinger of his left hand as well as a more discreet one on his pinky. Two of the seven strings are broken. A lemon — a symbol of constancy in love — lies on the sill beneath his billowing sleeve of blue fabric. Is this a portrait of a musician or a poet whose song has been cut short in some way, perhaps by rejection in love or death? The musical instrument, in fact, makes it clear that the young man is or was a poet. The lira da braccio was the instrument of choice for poet-improvisors in Fifteenth and Sixteenth century Italy. It was designed primarily for chordal accompaniments, with its five main strings and two outboard drones. Furthermore its association with Orpheus and the poets of antiquity heightened its appeal to poets: Apollo himself plays one in Raphael’s Parnassus in the Vatican Stanze.

The catalogue entry mentions two possible attributions. David Ekserdjian sees parallels in the early work of the Sienese painter, Domenico Beccafumi (1484 – 1551), notably the Trinity Altarpiece (1514) in the Siena Pinacoteca and two Madonnas in Berlin and Florence, which have also been attributed to the anonymous Maestro delle Eroine Chigi Saraceni. Others consider it to be Florentine, and Piero di Cosimo has been suggested as the author. Dennis Geronimous thinks is a Florentine work of c. 1505-25 by a younger artist, “well aware of older masters like Piero di Cosimo and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio but also responding to artists of the next generation such as Franciabigio, Andrea del Sarto, and Pontormo.” For my part I fail to see either Beccafumi or Piero di Cosimo in it, but I do see affinities with late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Florence. Even in his earliest works, Beccafumi favored a dramatic contrasty light, which breaks up the planes of his figures into isolated facets of intense light and shade. By contrast this portrait shows the steady, single-sourced light typical of Florentine painting from the 1490s to around 1515, which one sees in paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio, some works of Piero di Cosimo, and others. The Barberini Mary Magdalene by Piero which has been used as a point of comparison, resembles this painting only in window device. In the Magdalene Piero employed a contrasty illumination drawn from Leonardo’s early Benois Madonna. Piero’s handling of anatomical details like the hands is in fact more confident that the artist who painted the young man. I also fail to see the influence of the generations of Andrea del Sarto and the rest. It is rather the work of an artist somewhat older or more conservative than Piero.

I’m surprised that, to my knowledge, no one has proposed Lorenzo di Credi (Florence 1456-1536) for this painting. Lorenzo often favored the brightish, low-contrast lighting found in the Portrait of the Young Man, especially in the facial tones, which are gently modelled in this narrow range of gradations. One can compare the tondo of Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (1488-90) in the Galleria Borghese or the Uffizi Venus (c. 1490). The sensitively observant modelling of the young man’s facial planes appears in a typical and exceptionally fine head study by Lorenzo in the MFA in Boston. Note also the treatment of the sitter’s long, straight hair. One might well consider whether the physiognomy in the painting is an idealized version of the apprentice who posed for the drawing. A great many of Lorenzo’s head studies — clearly a favorite genre of his — have survived, and they are consistent with the both MFA drawing and the present painting.

There is also a strong Morellian argument in the poet’s hands, which are typical of Lorenzo di Credi in the summary tubular shape of the outstretched fingers that grasp the bow and the fingers bent around the neck of the Lira, with the backward-curving, slightly over-contoured lines of the thumb. Compare the fingers and thumbs of the Borghese Madonna and the Uffizi Venus, among others. The stylistic relationship to Lorenzo di Credi’s development and that of Florentine painting in general would suggest a date sometime between 1490 and 1510, perhaps more towards the middle of that period. The lira da braccio most closely resembles the instrument played by an angel in Giovanni Bellini’s S. Zaccaria Altarpiece of 1505. I hope to discuss this fascinating painting more systematically in the near future.

The are more pleasures and puzzles in this room — the strange Head and Shoulders of a Woman, dated in the catalogue to the 16th century, being one of the more disturbing among them, and Alessandro Allori’s Portrait of a Young Woman one of the pleasures — and there is much more in the baroque room that follows: an irresistably sexy small panel of a Young Woman (c. 1630–33) by Thomas de Keyser (c. 1596–1667), who was caught by the painter just as she is rising from her chair as a provocative hint of a smile curls her mouth, Alonso Sanchez Coello’s Portrait of a fifteen-year-old Elisabeth de Valois (c. 1560), who is splendidly tricked out but disturbingly frail, van Dyck’s Portrait of his London mistress, Margaret Lemon (c. 1638) and his oil sketch on paper of a Young Bearded Man (c. 1618–19). This is the richest gallery of all, including a rumbustious early Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1613–15) by Rubens, a haunting Young Man in a Gray Jacket (c. 1659) by Michael Sweerts, a magnificent Cranach, and Bernini’s portrait of his brother, Domenico Bernini (c. 1630–35), or so it is thought. Two “portraits” by Ribera of an ancient philosopher and a saint also enrich the room.

The final gallery extends well into the nineteenth century with superb works by Gros, Gérard, and David — all of eminent sitters — as well as a characteristially romantic self-portrait by Franquelin,  but for me the high point was Greuze’s nobly restrained portrait of the lawyer Jean Tupinier (1797), an old friend from the artist’s home town, Tournus. In the years after the Revolution Tupinier achieved prominence as a legislator and public servant. He helped Greuze in a difficult lawsuit when the artist’s career was in decline and he had suffered many personal reverses. In gratitude Greuze offered to paint a portrait of Mme. Tupinier, but she was ailing and could not come to Paris, and Greuze could not travel to Tournus. Instead he made a portrait of his friend to be offered as a gift to his wife. The painting remained in the family until 2006.

Don’t miss Eye to Eye. It is a thoroughly pleasurable show which will inform and stimulate your appreciation of the art of portraiture as no other, not to mention the art and science of connoisseurship, much despised in recent years, but needed. To think of all the suspect if not miserable scraps attributed to the likes of Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo one sees these days!

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*When I was a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, I was struck by the preponderance of portraits in the collection. It stands to reason that a traditionally Presbyterian town like Cleveland would have been attracted to portraiture as an alternative to religious painting. (It is probably not the only American museum in which a certain bit of accessions committee folklore circulates, according to which one prominent citizen saw a Botticelli hanging on the boardroom wall and growled, “Not another goddam madonna?!”) As I researched the matter further, I learned that, in the original installation of the collection when the museum first opened in 1917, the first thing one saw after climbing up the steps of the main entrance and entering through the huge doors was a Copley portrait of George Washington, surrounded by other founding luminaries. A visitor accessed the rest of the collection from this room. In 1917 xenophobia was rampant in the United States, fueled by Woodrow Wilson’s decision to join in the war in Europe. One of the prime missions of the museum was to educate the hundreds of thousands of Central European immigrants who had come to Cleveland to work in the factories and to prepare them to become good loyal Americans. A portrait of an educated, industrious statesman furthered this agenda far more effectively than what they saw as a reminder Old World superstitions.