Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo

Medici collection, Florence;
Riccardo Romolo Riccardi, Florence (included in his deceased inventory, 1612, p. 2, no. 13);
Thence by descent in the Riccardi collection until at least 1814, (included in the 14 September 1814 inventory, no. 256);
Charles T.D. Crews, London;
His deceased sale, London, Christie's, 2 July 1915, lot 144, as by Bronzino, where acquired by Smith;
L. Breitmeyer, London;
His deceased sale, London, Christie's, 27 June 1930, lot 19, as by Bronzino, where acquired by Pawsey and Payne;
Sir Thomas Merton, Winforton House, Hereford (according to Witt Library Mount);
With F.A. Drey, London;
Lord Burton, England;
With Wildenstein & Co., New York by 1952-1980, from whom acquired by the present owner.

 

Burlington House 1888
Florence, The Uffizi Gallery,  L'officina della maniera, 18 September 1996 – 6 January 1997;
Cleveland, Museum of Art,  Style, Truth, and the Portrait, 1 October – 10 November 1963;
Baltimore, Museum of Art, Bacchiacca and His Friends, 10 January – 19 February 1961;
Houston, Allied Arts Association, Masterpieces of Painting through Six Centuries, 16-27 November 1952.

B. Berenson, I Pittori italiani del rinascimiento, Milan 1948, p. 272, no. 133, reproduced;
H. Keutner, "Zu einigen Bildnissen des frühen Florentiner Manierismus," in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 8, 1959, p. 152;
G. Rosenthal, 'Bacchiacca and his friends. Comments on the exhibition', in The Baltimore Museum of Art News, XXIV, 2, 1961, pp. 14-15, 58, no 56, reproduced, as by Pontormo;
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Florentine School, vol. I, London 1963, p. 181, as by Pontormo;
G. Saisselin, Style, Truth and the Portrait, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland 1963, no. 2;
K.W. Forster, 'Probleme um Pontormos Porträtmalerei (I)', in Pantheon, XXII, 1964, p. 380, as by workshop of Bronzino datable circa 1540-41;
L. Berti, Pontormo, Florence 1964, p. 101, as not by Pontormo;
R.B. Simon, Bronzino's Portraits of Cosimo I in Armour, Ph. D., Columbia University, New York 1982, pp. 181-187, 343, as close to Pontormo;
P. Costamagna and A. Fabre, Les portraits florentins du début du XVI siècle à l'avènement de Cosimo I : catalogue raisonné d'Albertinelli à Pontormo, vol. II, Paris 1986, pp. 384-388, no 98, as by Pontormo;
J. Cox-Rearick, 'The Influence of Pontormo's Portrait', in Christie's sale catalogue, New York, 31 May 1989, as by Pontormo;
L. Berti, 'L'Alabardiere del Pontormo, in Critica d'Arte, LV, I, 1990, p. 46, as by workshop of Bronzino;
P. Costamangna, Pontormo, Milan 1994, pp. 242-244, no. 79, reproduced in colour, as by Pontormo;
A. Forlani Tempesti and A. Giovanetti, Pontormo, Florence 1994, p. 142, no. 48, reproduced, summarises previous positions;
E. Cropper, L'Officina della Maniera, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland 1996, p. 380, no. 142, as by Pontormo;
E. Cropper, Pontormo. Portrait of a Halberdier, Los Angeles 1997, pp. 100-105, no. 52;
A. Pinelli, La bellezza impure: Arte e politica nell'Italia del Rinascimento, Rome 2004, p. 129;
F. Russell, 'A Portrait of a Young Man in Black by Pontormo', in the Burlington Magazine, CL, October 2008, p. 676.

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting was on a poplar panel, possibly in a single piece. There were various cracks including one slightly slanting up through the shoulder and collar at centre right, and the edges seem to have been quite severely knocked or damaged at some time. The panel was radically thinned to a few millimetres apparently in the nineteen sixties, and backed with an inert composite board and metal cradle. The intense restoration of the front as well as the back is characteristic of that period. There is a broad border of retouching (about an inch wide), with much detailed retouching minutely inserted across the surface. Continuous original paint remains in parts of the hands and head and on the lighter wall, with the magnificent dark silhouette of the figure and play of blacks within the drapery still tangible, if remote. The surface, evidently paper thin from a raking light when transferred, has a sprayed synthetic varnish dimming the power of the darks, which a natural resin varnish might retrieve in part. Much of the retouching remains unaltered although there is slight discoloration of retouching on the head and hands. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This arresting portrait, depicting the young Cosimo I de'Medici, was painted by Pontormo in circa 1538 shortly after the sitter's accession to the title of Duke of Florence in 1537.  It has much in common with a portrait from 1537 in which Cosimo, a year or two younger, stands uncomfortably in a somewhat adolescent pose (fig. 2).¹ A direct comparison of the two portraits immediately indicates Cosimo's growing stature and comfort in his powerful position. The awkward, flaccid body of the earlier portrait is now one of strength and stature, although a certain anxiety remains. And the vacuous exuberance of youth is replaced by the composure of adulthood. His military pike is replaced by an intellectualising book and a bastion or fortress by an elegant, classical architectural interior. The bright colours of his pseudo-military costume that harks of past Republican times, and that he is known to have worn throughout his adolescence to the chagrin of his elders, is substituted for the then fashionable dark jacket in the Spanish style that he is recorded as wearing after his accession to the dukedom in 1537. Where in the Getty picture he was an awkward youth beset with a military yearning, now he is the paradigm of Renaissance man or, as Simon remarked in 1985 "less the ideal Herculean warrior than the ideal prince".²

The painting is described in the 1612 inventory of the Riccardi family, and is listed as hanging one picture away from the Getty portrait. It is, likewise, described as by Pontormo and representing Duke Cosimo:

Alla undecima lunetta à lato alla porta/ Un ritratto conforme agli altri ritratti dell'altre lunette si crede di mano do Jac.o da Puntormo con berettino in tests, penna bianca, et arme à canto con saio dell'Ecc.mo Duca Cosimo con ornam.to.³

Keutner, however, who discovered the 1612 inventory in 1959, originally connected the entry with Bronzino's Portrait of a Young Man with a Plumed hat (Nelson Gallery of art, Kansas City), a portrait neither by Pontormo nor representing Cosimo, and it was not until 1994, when Costamagna discovered a more detailed description of the portrait in an 1814 Riccardi  inventory (in which the sitter is described as holding a book and wearing the black Spanish style jacket) that the entry was inextricably linked with the present work. Likewise, the sitter in the Getty picture was only identified as Cosimo on discovery of the 1612 inventory in 1959, and had previously been described in all literature as Portrait of a halberdier or, for a brief time, as a portrait of a certain Francesco Guardi.⁴ Those that have subsequently objected to the identification of either portrait as Cosimo have usually done so on the basis of an unfavourable comparison of the face with that of Bronzino's Portrait of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici in armour of 1543 (Uffizi, Florence; fig. 3). Such a comparison is however largely discreditable, given that in Bronzino's portrait the sitter wears a beard and moustache, is now a fully grown man rather than a growing teenager and is shown in three-quarter profile rather than full-frontal. Moreover, it is an official state portrait where Pontormo's are more psychological or emotional, from an artist governed by a subjectivity that grossly opposed Bronzino's objective realism. As Simon observes, " The subjects of Pontormo's portraits are so reminiscent of the figures that populate the artist's religious pictures that one suspects they look like 'themselves' less than they approach Pontormo's abstract ideal.".⁵ The sitter in the present work does however bear much closer resemblance to earlier portraits of Cosimo: in both Pontormo's portrait of him as a seven year old and Ridolfo's as a twelve year old⁶ (fig.4) the sitter is characterised by the same round face, wide eyes and small mouth seen here.

Prior to the discovery of the Riccardi inventory, and the subsequent identification of the Getty portrait as Cosimo, those scholars that accepted the painting as by Pontormo generally dated it to 1529-30 based on a stylistic comparison with Pontormo's religious works from the late 1520s, such as the Lamentation in the Capponi chapel, Florence, which is characterised by a similar rhythmic elegance and bright palette. With the identification of the sitter as Cosimo, however, this dating had to be necessarily revised given that his likeness was captured throughout the 1530s (Ridolfo's above mentioned 1531 portrait of him as twelve year-old for example).  If we accept the now widely held view that the Getty picture dates from 1537, depicting Cosimo as an eighteen year old, the present work must have been executed only a year or two later; he is still clean-shaven, with out the straggly beard of Bronzino's 1543 portrait and still beset, to a certain degree, by "the dilemma of an adolescent suddenly catapulted into exposure and power."⁷ Cosimo is thus shown here after his accession to the dukedom of Florence in 1537 and around the time of, or just before, his marriage to Eleanor of Toledo in 1539.

Such a dating argues heavily in favour of the attribution to Pontormo.  He was the only major painter working for Cosimo at the time (Bronzino did not join his service until the 1540s) and he was clearly the portraitist of choice of both himself and his mother throughout the 1530s. Stylistically the present work has much in common with other portraits by the artist from that decade, in particular with the Alessandro de Medici of 1535⁸ and the Niccolo Ardinghelli of c. 1540-44.⁹ All three sitters are shown hip-length against an angular architectural background, the figures are similarly elongated and have the same sloping shoulders, and the palette is typically restrained. So, as Forster first suggested in 1964, and as the majority of others do now, there is no objection to a date in the late 1530s.

Pontormo's authorship, while accepted by all modern scholars, was the subject of much debate in the early part of the last century. Forster (1964) considered the painting a variant of the Getty portrait and gave it to Bronzino's studio, circa 1540-41. It was exhibited in Baltimore in 1961 as by Pontormo and was subsequently published by Berenson in 1963, also as by Pontormo. Likewise Costamagna and Fabre listed it as Pontormo in 1986, but Simon only considered it as close to Pontormo in 1985. More recently Cropper, Cox-Rearick (1989), Everett Fahy (private communication 2009) amongst others have all published the work as undoubtedly the work of Pontormo.

1. Sold New York, Christie's, 31 May 1989, lot 72, for $35,200,000.
2. See R.B. Simon, under Literature, p. 183.
3. See H. Keutner, 1959, p. 152. Keutner however originally connected the entry with Bronzino's Portrait of a Young Man with a Plumed hat (Nelson Gallery of art, Kansas City, a portrait neither by Pontormo nor representing Cosimo.
4. The painting was identified with a lost portrait by Pontormo of Francesco Guardi, described by Vasari in his Lives..., vol. VI, p. 275.
5.  Simon, 1985.
6. Cox-Rearick, p. 19, fig, 3, and p. 25, fig 7, respectively.
7. Cox-Rearick, p. 37.
8. Berti, 1964, pp. CLVII-CLIX, reproduced.
9. Cox-Rearick, p. 22, fig. 5.