Week 3, The Venetian Portrait

The State Portrait.

 Paolo Veneziano, Monument to Doge Francesco Dandolo, 1339, Sala del Capitolo, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Panel and stone.

Lazzaro Bastiani, Portrait of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1457-60, Museo Correr, Venice, oil on board, measurements unknown.[4]

Giovanni Bellini, Doge Leonardo Loredan, c. 1501, National Gallery, London, oil on panel, 61. 6 x 45.1 cm (24 ½ x 17 ¾ ).

According to the dictionary, the word “portrait” means a likeness that is drawn or painted. Perhaps the first portrait in this sense in Venice dates from 1339: the image of Francesco Dandolo by Paolo Veneziano which hangs over the Doge’s tomb in the Frari.[1] This panel shows Dandolo presented to the Virgin by St Francis, and it may be an authentic portrait despite the stylistic conventions of Byzantine painting which are present (Moretti, 32). This reveals another aspect of portraiture: it can be either naturalistic or stylized, or sometimes both. Dandolo’s face is a portrait, yet some of the religious figures in this picture are rendered realistically too. Now if we place the portrait concept in the realm of politics, we encounter the state portrait. State portraiture was important in Venice, particularly in the form of doge portraits. During Dandolo’s reign (1365-68) a series of portraits of Doges was begun in the Sala Maggiore Consiglio (Ducal Palace); these would be destroyed in the fire of 1577. The originals would have constituted a portrait gallery of heads of state painted by artists from Guariento to Tintoretto. If these are combined with the scenes from Venetian history which contain likenesses of famous rulers, the Ducal Palace can be considered one huge portrait gallery- a history of the republic in which individualised portraits appear. If we “unframe” these portraits from the huge pictorial narratives of the ducal galleries, we are left with the independent portraits which appear during the second half of the fifteenth-century. The greatest examples come from the Bellini firm: Gentile famously painted a portrait of the Sultan, Mahomet II; his brother Giovanni gave the world, arguably, the most realistic likeness of a Doge ever portrayed- Doge Leonardo Loredan, in the National Gallery.

The Aristocratic Portrait.

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Young Man with an Oil-lamp, 1506-10, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on wood, 42 x 36 cm.

 Circle of Giorgione, attributed to Vittore Belliniano, Portrait of a Young Man, (Antonio Brocardo?), 1508-10, Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm.

 Titian, The Man with the Blue Sleeve, about 1510, London, National Gallery, oil on canvas, 812 x 66.3 cm.[8]

Girolamo Savoldo, Shepherd with a Flute, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, oil on canvas, 97 x 78 cm.[12]

The climate of humanism and scholarship in renaissance Italy provides an alternative backdrop for the Venetian portrait: the aristocratic ideal. Apart from Bellini himself and visiting painters like Antonello da Messina, there exist “small scale portraits” of influential Venetian patricians like the mysterious Jacometto Veneziano’s Portrait of Alvise Contarini (New York).[2] Then there are semi-official portraits which fuse formality and intimacy like Paris Bordone’s obscure Portrait of a Man in Armour and Two Pages (New York). Marking the transition in Venice from the formal independent commemorative portraits of the Bellini and Jacometto to something more consciously elegant and aristocratic in manner are the portraits of Giorgione, and the painters associated with him. Though Giovanni Bellini undertook to portray elegant courtiers, Giorgione infused his portraits with a dreamy romanticism which was not only attractive in itself, but conveyed the idea of litteris servabitur orbis “the world will be saved by culture” (Moretti, 32). Giorgione and other artists like Lorenzo Lotto created a portrait of doomed youth; young men shown with an ardent, latent power unrecognised by the indifferent material world; youths placed in front of symbols like candles suggesting the transience of life. Good examples of the former are the portrait of a young man, possibly Antonio Brocardo, by a follower of Giorgione (Budapest); and for the latter, Lotto’s Portrait of a Young Man (Vienna). Sometimes these figures are shown in a rural setting; the close-up portrait-like format of such pictures as Savoldo’s A Shepherd with a Flute (Los Angeles) combines the aristocratic ideal and Giorgione’s pastorals. Titian learnt much about portraits from Giorgione but he shook off the tristesse of the dead painter and fashioned a more confident, assertive kind of portraiture reflecting the upward trajectory of his own career which is an arc of prestigious commissions. His sitters are the powerful who survey us dispassionately, or possibly with a hint of veiled contempt; we seem to be put firmly in our place by the Man with a Blue Sleeve (London) who literally looks down his nose at us. Titian’s aristocratic portraits give way to the official, sub fusc portraits of Tintoretto which include likenesses of magistrates, senators, and officials of the Doge’s palace: a collective social portrait of the professional classes in Venice, though social distinction communicated through costume is really inaugurated by Giovanni Bellini. With his fusion of portrait and the genre of corporate Venice, Tintoretto created a virtual monopoly that other painters found difficult to challenge. Some by temperament were disinclined to try. His great contemporary, Paolo Veronese, was no face painter; this artist preferred portraits within opulent, extravagant settings; there is the odd brilliant exception such as his independent portrait of the sculptor, Vittoria- see below. 

Artists, Sculptors and Artisans.

 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527, Royal Collection, Hampton Court, Oil on canvas, 104 x 117 cm.

Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada, 1567-68, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on canvas, 125 x 95 cm.[10]

Veronese, Portrait of Allesandro Vittoria, 1570, Metropolitan Museum of Art, oil on canvas, 110.5 x 81.9 cm.[13]

Titian, Self-Portrait, c. 1566, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 86 x 69 cm.[15]

Venice was first and foremost a trading centre and dealers and artists trafficked in art to make their living or supplement the one they had. We have been left a number of high quality portraits of these merchants, antiquarians and artists which provides information about the culture of collecting in 16^th century Venice. One of the most famous is Lotto’s Portrait of Andrea Odoni (Hampton Court) who lived in the sestiere of S. Croce in a palace frescoed with mythological figures (Brown). Another famous portrait of an antiquarian is that of Titian’s immortalisation of the numismatist Jacopo Strada (Vienna) who may be offering the statuette of Venus to the viewer- or snatching it back! We can add to this group a marvellously vibrant portrait of the most famous sculptor in late 16^th century Venice: Allesandro Vittoria by Veronese (New York); then there is the portrait of an unknown dealer surrounded by sculpture by a painter who may be Palma il Giovanni (Birmingham). Self-portraits were painted as endorsements of the artist’s profession, though the symbolism would inevitably rely upon less commercial and more scholarly traditions in which humanistic learning was celebrated; money and erudition would overlap occasionally. In Titian’s Self-Portrait (Prado), he wears a gold chain which not only symbolises the “links” in the chain of painting leading back to Apelles in the time of Alexander the Great, but also his personal wealth. Venetian links in that chain would have been Gentile Bellini and Giorgione who also left us likenesses of themselves: one showing Gentile as a dignified capomaestro; another, Giorgione as the young shepherd David burning with defiance.

A Meretricious Portrait: Courtesans, Crones and Canvases.

Titian, Lady in a Blue Dress (La Bella), 1536, Florence, Pitti Palace, 1536, oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cm.

Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Woman (La Bella), 1518-20, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 95 x 80 cm.

Bernardino Licinio, An Allegory of Love, 1520, Milan, Koelliker Collection, oil on canvas, 106 x 91 cm.[18]

Giovanni Cariani, Gentlemen and Courtesans, aka Sette Ritratti Albani (Seven Albani Portraits), 1519, Private collection, Bergamo, Oil on canvas, 117 x 117 cm.[19]

As Fortini Brown says, in Venice women were ornamental, and as a sign of their wealth and opulence they displayed jewellery.[3] Yet this was literally meretricious since mainly of these fine women were harlots and courtesans. It is also known that Titian used prostitutes for models and celebrated feminine works such as “La Bella” which might seem to convey aristocratic respectability and feminine propriety, but there is also something ambiguous about such pictures. Does it relay a “feminine ideal” (Brown) or is it a portrait of an actual woman? A window onto this culture of courtesans is also provided by group portraits in Venice which often serve as allegories of love and meditations on intimate relationships. Apart from allegorical portraits containing a group of people, e.g. Palma and Licinio, there are such intriguing paintings as the group portrait by the Bergamo artist Cariani who evokes a world of beauty, squalor, and lucre in his gathering of haughty courtesans, shifty procuresses and blasé courtiers, all in the same painting.

Slides

1)      Paolo Veneziano, Monument to Doge Francesco Dandolo, 1339, Sala del Capitolo, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Panel and stone.
2)      Lazzaro Bastiani, Portrait of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1457-60, Museo Correr, Venice, oil on board, measurements unknown.[4]
3)      Gentile Bellini, Portrait of Mehmet II, 1480, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 70 x 52 cm.
4)      Giovanni Bellini, Doge Leonardo Loredan, c. 1501, National Gallery, London, oil on panel, 61. 6 x 45.1 cm (24 ½ x 17 ¾ ).
5)      Tullio Lombardo, “Bacchus and Ariadne, “probably 1510, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Marble, height 56 cm.[5]
6)      Antonello da Messina, Portrait of a Man (“Il Condottiere”), 1475, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 cm.
7)      Jacometto Veneziano, Alvise Contarini, Portrait of a Woman, 1485-95, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Oil on panel, 11 x 8 cm, 10 x 7 cm.[6]
8)      Same, back of canvas, a seated hare.  
9)      Jacometto Veneziano, Possibly a Nun of San Secondo; (verso) Scene in Grisaille, same location.
10)  Vincenzo Catena, Portrait of a Young Man, 1505-10, London, National Gallery, oil on panel, 30.5 x 23.5 cm.[7]
11)  Circle of Giorgione, attributed to Vittore Belliniano, Portrait of a Young Man, (Antonio Brocardo?), 1508-10, Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm.
12)  Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Young Man with an Oil-lamp, 1506-10, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on wood, 42 x 36 cm.
13)  Titian, The Man with the Blue Sleeve, about 1510, London, National Gallery, oil on canvas, 812 x 66.3 cm.[8]
14)  Titian, Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove, 1520-22, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Oil on canvas, 100 x 89 cm.[9]
15)  Same with frame.
16)  Restoration photographs of Man with the Blue Sleeve: left 1900, before acquisition; right, 2014.
17)  Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527, Royal Collection, Hampton Court, Oil on canvas, 104 x 117 cm.
18)  Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada, 1567-68, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on canvas, 125 x 95 cm.[10]
19)  Paris Bordone, Portrait of a Man in Armour with Two Pages, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, oil on canvas, 116.8 x 157.5 cm.[11]
20)  Girolamo Savoldo, Shepherd with a Flute, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, oil on canvas, 97 x 78 cm.[12]
21)  Veronese, Portrait of Allesandro Vittoria, 1570, Metropolitan Museum of Art, oil on canvas, 110.5 x 81.9 cm.[13]
22)  Allesandro Vittoria, St Sebastian, 1566, Metropolitan Museum of Art, bronze, 54.3 x 17 x 16 cm.
23)  Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of Allesandro Vittoria, 1552-53, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on canvas, 87,5 x 70 cm.
24)  Attributed to Palma Il Giovane, Portrait of a Collector, early 17^th century, Birmingham Art Gallery, oil on canvas, oil on canvas, 108 x 103 cms.[14]
25)  Tullio Lombardo, “Self-Portrait” with his Wife in Ancient Guise, 1490-1510, Galleria Franchetti, Ca' d'Oro, Venice, Marble, 47 x 50 cm.
26)  Gentile Bellini, Self-Portrait, c. 1496, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Charcoal on paper, 23 x 194 mm.
27)  Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, c. 1510, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, Oil on canvas, 52 x 43 cm.
28)   Wenceslaus Hollar, Giorgione's Self-Portrait as David, 1650, Engraving, British Museum, London.
29)  Titian, Self-Portrait, c. 1566, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 86 x 69 cm.[15]
30)  Giovanni Britti, Self-Portrait by Titian, 1550, British Museum, London, woodcut, 415 x 325 mm.[16] 
31)  Tintoretto, Portrait of Procurator Jacopo Soranzo, c. 1550, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, Oil on canvas, 106 x 90 cm.[17]
32)  Titian, Lady in a Blue Dress (La Bella), 1536, Florence, Pitti Palace, 1536, oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cm.
33)  Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Woman (La Bella), 1518-20, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 95 x 80 cm.
34)  Bernardino Licinio, An Allegory of Love, 1520, Milan, Koelliker Collection, oil on canvas, 106 x 91 cm.[18]
35)  Giovanni Cariani, Gentlemen and Courtesans, aka Sette Ritratti Albani (Seven Albani Portraits), 1519, Private collection, Bergamo, Oil on canvas, 117 x 117 cm.[19]
36)  Titian, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1565, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 76 x 69 cm.

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[1] A short useful introduction to Venetian portraits is by Lino Moretti in The Genius of Venice 1500-1600, R.A., 32-34.

[2] A miniature of this is in the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection. See The Age of Titian, (Edinburgh, 2004), no. 6.

[3] Patricia Fortini Brown, The Renaissance in Venice: A World Apart, Everyman Library, 1997, 154-160.

[4] From the 1300s onwards the ceremonial crown and well-known symbol of the doge of Venice was called corno ducale, a unique kind of a ducal hat. It was a stiff horn-like bonnet, which was made of gemmed brocade or cloth-of-gold and worn over the camauro, a fine linen cap with a structured peak reminiscent of the Phrygian cap, a classical symbol of liberty. Foscari, of an ancient noble family, served the Republic of Venice in numerous official capacities—as ambassador, president of the Forty, member of the Council of Ten, inquisitor, Procuratore di San Marco,[1] avvogadore di comun— before he was elected in 1423,[2] thus defeating the other candidate, Pietro Loredan. His task as doge was to lead Venice in a long and protracted series of wars against Milan, governed by the Visconti, who were attempting to dominate all of northern Italy.[3] Despite the justification of Venetian embroilment in the terraferma that was offered in Foscari's funeral oration, delivered by the humanist senator and historian Bernardo Giustiniani,[4] and some encouraging notable victories, the war was extremely costly to Venice, whose real source of wealth and power was at sea, a connection celebrated annually in the Doge's 'Marriage to the Sea' ceremony. The ritual required the Doge to sail into the Lido in his Bucentaure (a royal golden ship) and toss a ring into the ocean, thus cementing the bond Venice held with the Adriatic. Critics also claimed that Venice during Foscari's leadership abandoned her ally Florence; they were eventually overcome by the forces of Milan under the leadership of Francesco Sforza. Sforza soon made peace with Florence, however, leaving Venice adrift.

Coat of arms of Francesco Foscari.

Foscari was married twice: first to Maria Priuli, and then in 1415 to Marina Nani.[5] In 1445, his only surviving son, Jacopo, was tried by the Council of Ten on charges of bribery and corruption and exiled from the city. Two further trials, in 1450 and 1456, led to Jacopo's imprisonment on Crete and his eventual death there.

News of Jacopo's death caused Foscari to withdraw from his government duties, and in October 1457 the Council of Ten forced him to resign. However, his death a week later provoked such public outcry that he was given a state funeral.The Parting of the Two Foscari by Francesco Hayez,1842 (Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence). Beside his profile portrait by Lazzaro Bastiani, Foscari commissioned a bas-relief bronze plaquette from Donatello, which survives in several examples.[6] His figure kneeling in prayer to St Mark figured over the portal to the Doge's Palace until it was dismantled by order of the revolutionary government, 1797; the head was preserved and is conserved in the Museo dell'Opera di Palazzo Ducale.[7] His monument by the sculptor Antonio Bregno in collaboration with his architect brother Paolo was erected in Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice.[8]In literature and opera[edit]Foscari's life was the subject of a play The Two Foscari by Lord Byron (1821) and an episode in Samuel Rogers' long poem Italy. The Byron play served as the basis for the libretto written by Francesco Maria Piave for Giuseppe Verdi's opera I due Foscari, which premiered on 3 November 1844 in Rome. Mary Mitford, author of the popular literary sketches of the English countryside entitled Our Village, also wrote a successful play concerned with events in Foscari's life. Mitford's play debuted at Covent Garden in 1826 with famed actor Charles Kemble in the lead. hough first documented in 1449 as a painter in a workshop in Venice, Lazzaro Bastiani may have received his youthful training in Padua. His early paintings show the influence of Andrea Mantegna's style, with an interest in classical antiquity and rounded, sculptural forms. In Venice, Bastiani seems to have gravitated into the circle of artists working around Mantegna's in-laws, the Bellini family. In the 1460s he may have collaborated with Giovanni Bellini on three triptychs for a major Venetian church. In the 1480s he worked with Gentile Bellini for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, a confraternity dedicated to doing good works. Bastiani's paintings from this time show an interest in depicting space in rigorous perspective. Disputing the extent of Bastiani's body of work, scholars have reattributed some of his early paintings to the young Giovanni Bellini.

[5] The Genius of Venice, no. S10. Notes that this is “probably a double portrait of a Venetian couple all’ antica.”

[6] From Met web site. This exquisite and enigmatic portrait and its pendant (1975.1.86) are most likely the works by the Venetian painter and illuminator Jacometto, recorded by the connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel in the collection of a Venetian patrician in 1543. Michiel, who praised them as "a most perfect work," identified the man as Alvise Contarini and the woman as a "nun of San Secondo" (a Benedictine convent in Venice). The paired portraits and the allusion to fidelity on the verso of the male effigy (a roebuck chained beneath the Greek word AIEI, meaning “forever”) would normally suggest a married couple; however, her possible status as a nun makes it difficult to determine their relationship. If the garment is a habit, which seems doubtful given her bare shoulders, she may have led a secular life as a nun or entered the convent as a widow. The portrait may have been commissioned platonically (such cases are known). Alternatively, the wimple-like headdress may represent an entirely secular and contemporary fashion trend. Perhaps the portraits, which probably fit together in a boxlike frame, were designed to hide their clandestine relationship.

Illustrating the influence of Netherlandish painting on Venetian portraiture, the portraits are striking for their meticulous detail, highly refined technique, and luminous, atmospheric landscape backgrounds.

[7] The Age of Titian (no. 7). Blue sky and frontal bust view typical of Bellini, though the master preferred to show his sitters in ¾ view and add a marble parapet at the base of the composition. 

[8] Titian, (London, NG, 2003), no. 5.

[9] Titian: Prince of Painters, (Venice and Washington, 1990), no. 17. May be Ferrante Gonzaga at age 16 after a return from Spain. (Hope).

[10] Antonio Paolucci uses the span between the Blue Sleeve man and the Strada portrait as a gauge for assessing Titian’s portrait development- a gap of almost sixty years. Paolucci, “The Portraits of Titian” in Titian, Prince of Painters, (Venice and Washington, 1990, 101-108. Strada was courtier, amateur architect, art dealer, antiquarian and collector. For his activity as a numismatist, Haskell History and its Images: Art and its Interpretation of the Past, (Yale, 1993), 14f.

[11] See The Renaissance in Italy and Spain, exh cat, Metropolitan Museum of Art, (1987), 139. This may be Carlo da Rho who died fighting against the Turks in 1559, but ses Met website for a rejection of the identification and reasons why. Paris is known to have painted his portrait in Milan in 1540. As noted by Andrea Bayer, “North of the Apennines: Sixteenth- Century Italian Painting”, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Summer, 2005, 42, this little known painting by a minor master is a forerunner of Caravaggio’s Portrait of Wignancourt.

[12] The Genius of Venice, no. 85, in private collection before sold to the Getty. See The Age of Titian (no. 41) for a variant in the Earl of Wemyss’s collection. This may well be a later copy which is disputed by the curators. Their suggestion that the expression of this shepherd is more “poetic” seems incomprehensible. Scottish copy purchased by the Earl of Wemyss with an attribution to Giorgione, questioned by Waagen in 1856. He re-attributed to Savoldo in 1871. Gilbert notes (Genius of Venice) that Scottish variant was “noted by Cavalcaselle” and “regularly attributed to Savoldo long before the discovery of the original, which was then wrongly reported for a time (first by Longhi) to be the same painting in new ownership.”

[13] In this portrait the features of the greatest Venetian sculptor of the later sixteenth century, Alessandro Vittoria, are recorded by the greatest painter of his generation, Veronese. Vittoria is shown with the model for one of his most famous statues, the "Saint Sebastian," carved in 1561–62 for the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. This figure was later cast by Vittoria twice as a bronze statuette—one of these belongs to the Metropolitan. Vittoria had portraits of himself holding his own sculpture painted by eminent artists at various times in his life; five were hung near the studio in his house where they could be seen by clients and visitors. This portrait was done around 1580 when the sitter was about fifty-five.

[14] World Art (exh cat., Birmingham, 1999), no. 39.It could be Antonio Vassilacchi (1556-1629)  Contains cast of Vitellius and another version of Vittoria’s St Sebastian. Attribution to Palma “recently challenged” and Annibale Carracci proposed.

[15] Titian, Prince of Painters, no. 64.

[16] The Genius of Venice, P41. As “Titian and Giovanni Britti.” In the words of David Landau. “It has often been argued that Titian is shown here drawing on a woodblock, but it seems to me he is holding a tablet on which a piece of paper could be laid for drawing, for it is far too thin to be a woodblock. A professional cutter would not make such a mistake.”

[17] Accademia Guide, no. 239. Acq 1812; originally in Ducal palace; painted I years before Soranzo’s death in 1561.

[18] The Age of Titian, no. 23

[19] The Genius of Venice, no 27. Rejects identifications; more likely to be a group of gentlemen and courtesans with a procuress.