Retrato de um Homem (Portrait of a Man, Ottaviano de' Medici?, Wearing a Large Hat, with a Box of Wax Seals Resting on a Ledge Before Him) - Andrea del Sarto

Retrato de um Homem (Portrait of a Man, Ottaviano de Medici?, Wearing a Large Hat, with a Box of Wax Seals Resting on a Ledge Before Him) - Andrea del Sarto
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Following the departures of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael from Florence by 1508, Andrea del Sarto emerged as the preeminent painter in the city (a circumstance that led one scholar to bestow on him the ironic designation “Florentine caposcuola by default”). He oversaw a large and industrious workshop, and numbered among his gifted pupils and followers Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, luminaries of the Florentine maniera, as well as the painters Francesco Salviati and Giorgio Vasari and the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli. His style fuses a delicate sfumato inspired by Leonardo with a subtle, luminous and jewellike palette. Surfaces are crystalline, polished and prismatic, with flesh and fabric undifferentiated. A quiet and deeply moving pathos imbues his numerous altarpieces and private devotional images, while his portraits—which share the exquisite coloristic sensibility of his religious compositions, if in a more subdued range—offer sensitive and penetrating likenesses of his mostly reticent sitters.
Prolific as a painter of frescoes and panel paintings, and also as a draftsman, Andrea del Sarto produced a small number of portraits over the course of his roughly 30-year career, although this was not the primary focus of his activity. This singular example—the attribution of which is unassailable on stylistic grounds—is an important new addition to his oeuvre, and significantly augments the modest corpus of portraits by him. Its authorship was confirmed by the late Professor Sydney Freedberg, a preeminent expert on the artist, who considered it “an autograph portrait by Andrea del Sarto… of very high quality” (letter to the owner, January 14, 1991). Despite this authoritative endorsement, and its self-evident significance—both as a newly discovered work by the artist and a notable addition to the inventory of early 16th-century Florentine male portraits by the likes of Franciabigio, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Giuliano Bugiardini Francesco Granacci, and Sarto himself—the Portrait of a Man has remained unknown until now.
On stylistic grounds, the portrait can be dated to the mid-1520s, making it a mature work from the last decade of the artist’s life. (He died of the plague in 1530.) This was a period of intense activity. In those years, he was absorbed in the ongoing campaign to fresco the Chiostro dello Scalzo with monochrome scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence—one of the most significant undertakings of his career—and the monumental Last Supper in the refectory of San Salvi, a monastic church on the outskirts of Florence. As in Leonardo da Vinci’s paradigmatic treatment of the subject, the Apostles gathered around Jesus show a compelling range of emotions and expressions. Following the practice of Leonardo and Raphael, for the Last Supper and other works Andrea produced masterful chalk studies of heads and hands, which allowed him to explore and fix the individual figures’ heightened emotional states. It was not unusual for his portraits, too, to be preceded by head studies of the sitters, executed in order to capture both their outer physical likeness and their inner animating spirit. Although no such preparatory drawing for present portrait is known, it is not difficult to imagine that one preceded the acutely captured aspect of this sitter.
Internal evidence supports the portrait’s proposed chronology. The sitter’s clothing, notably the broad-brimmed hat and the tunic with a voluminous upper sleeve, worn here under a mantle, points to a date in the 1520s. Two contemporaneous portraits by Rosso Fiorentino (National Gallery, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) offer close comparisons; the unknown sitters in both wear hats and tunics with ballooning sleeves, that are markedly similar to the costume of the sitter in Sarto’s portrait. (Both these sartorial flourishes would soon disappear from the lexicon of Florentine male fashion, to be replaced by small berets and tighter, often slashed, sleeves).
This dating places the work some seven or eight years later than the celebrated portrait of a man—possibly Lorenzo di Matteo Peri, a Florentine stationer—in the National Gallery, London, with which it nevertheless shares a number of similarities, notably the same half-length format and tight compression of the sitter in a shallow, unarticulated space; the presence and placement of a single, sparse piece of furniture; and the dark, non-descript background. Their faces each partly enveloped in shadow, both sitters’ heads are turned at the identical ¾ angle, and their poses, with arm extended along the lower edge of the composition, are analogous if essentially reversed, with one seen from the front and the other from the rear. Separating the execution of these two masterful portraits was Andrea’s presumed trip to Rome, where he would have seen Raphael’s recent work. Unparalleled in Florentine portraiture of the period, the sober dignity of the man in the present portrait is indebted to Raphael’s portrayals of male sitters like Baldassare Castiglione (Paris, Louvre), Agostino Beazzano (the sitter on the left in the double portrait; Rome, Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj), and Antonio Tebaldeo (whereabouts unknown), all executed in the mid-1510s.
The identity of Andrea del Sarto’s sitter is unknown, but his elegant and obviously costly attire conveys his wealth and elevated social standing. While most of the artists’ portraits, like those of his collaborator Franciabigio (1482-1525), depict merchants, artisans, and functionaries—identified by the tools of their respective trades that appear as attributes in their portraits — the subject here is a patrician, as his costume, it bears repeating, clearly signals. In the 1520s, when the portrait was painted, Florence was nominally a republic, although the powerful Medici family—long the true wielders of political power of the city, which clung to the trappings of its proud republican past while knowing the pretense was performative rather than authentic—had reestablished a political stranglehold after a period of exile. In this perilous and politically fraught decade, which culminated in the bloody Siege of Florence in 1529-30, the definitive demise of the republic, and the official establishment of the Medici as autocratic hereditary dukes, the populace was divided into pro-Medicean and pro-republican camps. Some portraits of the period appear to contain coded messaging about the sitter’s political leanings. A case in point is Pontormo’s seductive portrait of two friends (Venice, Cini Foundation): the letter with a legible passage from the ancient Roman orator and statesman Cicero’s dialogue On Friendship held by one of the sitters has been interpreted as obliquely signaling their, or the unknown recipient’s, republican sympathies. This interesting interpretation is speculative, but what is certain is that one and perhaps both the sitters—Pontormo’s close friends, according to Vasari, who referred to this portrait in his biography of the artist—were the sons-in-law of the glassmaker Beccuccio Bicchieraio (Domenico di Jacopo di Matteo), whose appealing likeness was captured by Andrea del Sarto in a slightly later portrait (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland).
Given that it lacks any of the pictorial devices believed to signal pro-Republican (and therefore anti-Medicean) sentiments, the present portrait may depict someone in the pro-Medici camp, a surmise bolstered by the observation that the sitter wears the traditional colors—red and blue—of the familiar Medici stemma (coat-of-arts) with its red and blue palle (balls). It has been suggested that the subject is Ottaviano de’ Medici (1484-1546), a member of a minor branch of the Medici family. As yet uncorroborated by documentary evidence, the proposal is compelling nonetheless, and it warrants due consideration. Ottaviano was married to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s grand-daughter Francesca Salviati—the probable subject of a fetching portrait of woman in a red gown by Bronzino (Frankfurt, Städel Museum)—a pedigree that gave him impressive bona fides in pro-Medicean circles, and he operated as a loyal agent and guardian of the family’s interests in Florence during the pontificates of the Medici popes Leo X (r. 1513-21) and Clement VII (r. 1523-34). Ottaviano was, moreover, the patron of Andrea del Sarto, who painted the Medici Holy Family (Florence, Uffizi) for him. When his Medicean allegiance landed him in prison during the waning days of the Florentine republic, the artist safeguarded the coveted picture, fending off offers by clamoring would-be buyers until Ottaviano was freed and could take ownership. (The grateful client paid him double.) He was also a mentor of Giorgio Vasari, who credited his early success as an artist at the new Medici ducal court in Florence in the mid-1530s to Ottaviano’s sponsorship.
One of Ottaviano’s undertakings as a Medici henchman in Florence was the formation of a family portrait gallery, for which he gathered and occasionally commissioned images of illustrious relations. These included Raphael’s Portrait of Leo X with Two Cardinals (Palazzo Pitti), Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino (private collection), and Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours (a version is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Pontormo’s posthumous Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater Patriae (Florence, Uffizi), and two symbol-laden portraits by Vasari, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Duke Alessandro de’ Medici in Armor (both Florence, Uffizi)—the latter a blatant piece of Medici political propaganda in its assertion of the dubious Alessandro’s right to rule the subjugated city of Florence. Here again, he and Andrea del Sarto intersected: when the newly elected Pope Clement VII ordered Raphael’s portrait of Leo X sent off as a diplomatic gift in 1523 (roughly the date of the present work), Ottaviano, loathe to relinquish it, had Sarto execute a copy, which was dispatched in its stead. So masterful was the replica that it persuaded in its deception (and so in demand was the original that Ottaviano later had Vasari make another copy; that version is now in Holkham Hall).
As the Medici popes’ trusted “boots on the ground” in Florence, which they surveilled and meddled in ceaselessly from their lofty perch in Rome, Ottaviano’s most important assignment was to oversee the campaign to fresco the salone of Poggio a Caiano, a family villa outside Florence, with historical scenes celebrating—and mythologizing—the Medici dynasty. (The project was conceived at the end of the pontificate of Leo X, when his cousin and close confidante, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the future Clement VII, was Archbishop of Florence and de facto ruler of the city.) Foremost among the narratives was Andrea del Sarto’s Tribute to Caesar (1520-21), a thinly veiled glorification of Medici political power carried out not long before the present portrait. As a key protagonist in this ambitious commission, Ottaviano was a party to and purveyor of Medici myth-making. Given his ongoing association with Andrea del Sarto, it is easy to imagine that the artist would have executed Ottaviano’s portrait—a tantalizing scenario in which the present work undoubtedly figures.
A clue to the identity of the sitter here resides in the small casket on the table and its contents. These appear to be wax seals. Affixed to private letters, diplomatic correspondence, and official documents as a mark of authenticity, seals denote the holder’s (and often, the recipient’s) authority and high station, the status Ottaviano de’ Medici enjoyed in Florence. A roughly contemporaneous portrait illustrating their use in this way is Sebastiano del Piombo’s Ferry Carondelet and his Two Secretaries (Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum). Garbed in a costly, fur-lined cloak and seated at a table covered in a Lotto rug (like his costume, a sign of wealth and status), the prelate-diplomat clutches a folded letter. Several other, opened missives, their red wax seals visible, clutter the table before him. Papal legate to the court of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian at the time the portrait was executed, Carondelet is obviously the recipient of these written communications, responses to which are being penned by the attentive secretary seated beside him.
Essential for identifying the sitter, the seals in the Sarto portrait —if seals they in fact are—are not entirely analogous. They are not affixed to correspondence but have been pried or cut out of the paper to which they were originally attached and assembled like precious gems (a collecting specialty of the Medici) in the small, silk-lined casket. Moreover, the sitter here—who is neither a secretary, as his elegant garb makes clear, nor a dignitary executing the duties of rank or office—is not engaged in any act of writing, personal or professional, in which seals would be used, as the absence of paper and writing implements makes clear. There is a marked difference between this man’s withdrawn reverie in the presence of his enigmatic tokens and the active, alert attitude of the young man writing in a ledger book, a folded letter with a wax seal seen on the ledge before him, in a contemporary portrait by Franciabigio (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie). Comparison with the portraits by both Sebastiano and Franciabigio make clear that, whoever it represents, this is a private rather than an official or public image. The same is true of the National Gallery portrait, whose sitter, absorbed in a private pursuit, turns his back to the viewer and looks back over his shoulder, interrupted. And while the present work cannot be considered a friendship portrait, as the London portrait surely is—the patrician sitter here is the artist’s social superior rather than his equal—it is of note that both are painted on thin canvas or linen, a lightweight support that was more easily transportable, and less expensive, than wood panel. The implications of its use here remain to be more fully investigated.
In keeping with the interpretation of the portrait as a private rather than public or official depiction, the excised seals (for lack of a clearer identification) in their elegant coffer should be seen as mementos having personal meaning or value to the sitter. (Were they attached to letters he received, they signify his impressive network of connections—a visual iteration of Renaissance name-dropping.) In this regard, they are akin to the kind of precious and esoteric bibelots frequently displayed by subjects in Renaissance portraits as signs of their cultivated taste and erudition, a convention seen, for instance, in Alessandro Allori’s portrait of Ortensia Montauto de’ Bardi (Florence, Uffizi).
Whoever the sitter here might be, his averted gaze and introspective mien suggest contemplation rather than action: he is not engaged in the worlds of commerce or diplomacy, nor does he have the character of a humanist or poet like the male sitters in Raphael’s Roman portraits. Withdrawn and absorbed in thought, he ruminates on the rarefied objects before him that carry personal and private meaning. Significantly, his aspect recalls one of Michelangelo’s capitani in the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence, an idealized portrayal of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, who is often characterized as a personification of the vita contemplativa (contemplative life). The portrait transcends mere descriptive likeness to capture what Leonardo called the “moti mentali”—the animating movements of the mind—even if its subject evasively guards those inner thoughts. In this consummate demonstration of his great gifts as a portraitist, Vasari’s declaration that Andrea del Sarto was “senza errore”—in essence, the perfect painter—resounds.