Annibale Carracci

Rondel Investments, until September 30 1987, when acquired by the present owner.

London, Trafalgar Galleries and Royal Academy, Trafalgar Galleries at the Royal Academy IV, 1985, no. 15;
Athens, Natoinal Gallery Alexander Santzos Museum, El Greco in Italy and Italian Art, 1995, no. 36.

R. Cohen, Trafalgar Galleries at the Royal Academy IV, exhibition catalogue, London 1985, pp. 42-43, no. 15, reproduced in colour;
S. Pepper in N. Chatzinikolaou ed., El Greco in Italy and Italian art, exhibition catalogue, Athens 1995, pp. 279, 496-498, no. 36;
G. Mancini, Considerazioni Sulla Pittura, vol. I, Rome 1956, pp. 218-220.

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a recent lining and stretcher, apparently over a previous thinner lining canvas. The painting may have been rolled at some time and has a quite fine horizontal craquelure, especially near the top. The surface has been rather flattened in lining at some point. The edges have fairly substantial retouchings, with slightly less old damage along the base. There may be a faint trace of scalloping and old stretcher bar line on the right side, but not on any of the other edges. There is a patch of retouching (about 2cm x 1cm) in the beard to the left of the chin, a small retouched damage just above the shoulder in the right background, and another small retouching at lower centre. The head has scattered small retouchings and slightly crushed brushwork but has survived quite impressively the wrinkles of age and is largely undamaged. The beard is fairly blurred, and the drapery is even more dimly comprehensible, with possible alterations such as a half sketched in arc in the lower right corner, much wear and/or perhaps semi finished work, among which the extraordinary originality of the head stands out. 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 portrait of an unknown gentleman, his open-mouthed grin revealing a lost tooth, was painted by the youthful Annibale during the 1580s, probably soon after his first journey to Venice. As with his genre pictures, like The bean-eater,¹ all of which also date from the 1580s, the painting encapsulates the extraordinary naturalism with which Annibale sought to portray his subjects, eschewing the elaborate, non-naturalistic inventiveness that characterised the 'Mannerist' style, prevalent in Italy at the time. This sudden return to naturalism, which in many ways pre-empts the "Baroque", led Bellori and other 17^th century theoreticians to consider Annibale a heroic artist who had rescued painting from its fatal decline and restored it back to the level of Raphael.

Each of Annibale's few portraits belong to a very distinct phase of his career when, as a man in his early twenties, he was profoundly, albeit briefly, influenced by the genre scenes of Bartolommeo Passarotti and the work of contemporary artists in Venice. The portraits are amongst the first of their type, in which the artist rejects the idealism of the 'Mannerist' phase in favour of an entirely naturalistic, realistic and unidealised representation of the human form. With the present portrait, the sitter's face and features are the focus of the painting, rather than, for example, some elaborate costume, here only sketched in and remaining relatively undefined; it thus differs markedly from the portraits of his contemporaries, like Anthonis Mor, who were concerned with every detail of the clothing and, without exception, represented the sitter in formal pose and almost always expressionless. This portrait is thus the antithesis of the traditional portrait; here the gentleman's body is angled away, his face glancing back at the viewer, caught in a spontaneous, unforced pose.

Portraits however were not the mainstay of Annibale's oeuvre, and instead provided him with a rest from the fatigue of working on large commissions as Mosini, a biographer, writes in 1646:

da cio nasceva, che occupato Annibale nelle opera piú grandi di molto studio, e fatica, egli prendeva il suo riposo, e recreazione dall'istesso operare della sua professione, disegnando, o dipingendo qualche cosa, come per ischerzo: e tra le molte, che in tale maniera operò, postosi à disegnare con la penna l'effigie del volto, et di tutta la persona...²

The present work's immediacy, and the sitter's vigour, owe much to the energetic application of paint and bravura brushwork, the so-called 'pittura di tocca', a technique Annibale undoubtedly learnt in Venice from Tintoretto, the Bassano, and Veronese. The portrait has much in common with those of Tintoretto, many of whose portraits are similarly lively in execution, the focus purely on the face and features, with no suggestion of the sitter's identity or occupation.³ After his arrival in Rome in 1595, where he would become the leading painter of the day and execute his masterpiece, so beloved of Bellori, the ceiling of the Farnese gallery, Annibale does not appear to have painted any portraits, the monumental nature of the commissions he undertook there assuring that there was no place for such intimate or personal works. Both Sir Denis Mahon and Stephen Pepper have dated this portrait to the late 1580s, the latter more specifically to circa 1587-88 on account of its debt to the Venetians whose effects of colour, light and brushwork Annibale studied closely from the middle years of that decade.

1. Rome, Galleria Corsini. See D. Benati et al., Annibale Carracci, exhibition catalogue, Rome 2007, pp. 108-09, no. II.8, reproduced.
2. Also quoted in C.C. Malvasia, La Felsina Pittrice, vol. I, 1678, p. 469.
3. See, for example, the portrait sold in these Rooms, 9 July 2008, lot 71.