BERNADINO GATTI, CALLED IL SOJARO | Portrait of a lady wearing an embroidered black dress and a gold chain

Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 5 July 1996, lot 37 (as attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola):

With Galleria Orsi, Milan;

Acquired by the present collector in 1998.

F. Moro, Caravaggio Sconosciuto, Le origini del merisi, eccellente disegnatore, maestro di ritratti e di 'cose naturali', Turin 2016, pp. 112–13, reproduced pl. 92 (as attributed to Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio).

Professor Marco Tanzi was the first to identify this portrait as being by the hand of the Lombard painter Bernardino Gatti. Active throughout the most compelling era of Lombard and Emilian artistic endeavour, Gatti worked under the classicising influence of Raphael and Giulio Romano, alongside artists such as Correggio, Pordenone and Bartholomaeus Spranger in the decoration of churches throughout Parma, Cremona and Pavia. Tanzi dates this portrait to the 1550s or 60s by which time Gatti was working in Cremona.

Tanzi notes in his written expertise on this portrait (available upon request), that there is no comprehensive list or analysis of Gatti's works, but that the best known cohesive group of his œuvre is formed of the portraits that he executed in the 1530s. Gatti's works from this later Cremonese period, to which Tanzi attributes the present painting, is known only through multi-figure compositions of largely religious subjects. He notes in particular Gatti's fresco of The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the church of San Pietro al Po,¹ which includes a large number of figures, many of which share the same interest in individual characterisation that certainly preoccupied Gatti in his creation of the present portrait. Tanzi also compares the execution of the face and features of this portrait to the upturned face of the Madonna in Gatti's Annunciation in the Church of San Sigismondo, just outside the old city of Cremona.²

¹ Fondazione Zeri Archive, ref. no. 31760.

² Fondazione Zeri Archive, ref. no. 31758; see M.L. Ferrari, Il tempio di San Sigismondo a Cremona, Cremona 1974, p. 94, reproduced p. 102, pl. 115.