Manner of Alessandro Allori

The Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld, Paris;

With Charles Michel, Paris;

With E Garin, Paris (as Bronzino, circa 1527);

From whom acquired with pendant by Karl Haberstock, Berlin, 23 February 1943, for FF 4 million;

Führermuseum, Linz (Inv. no. 2741);

In storage at Alt Ausee (Inv. no. 3910);

Central Collecting Point, Munich, July 15, 1945 (Inv. no. 8663, as attributed to an imitator of Bronzino);

Transferred to the French authorities, 3 June 1948;

Morris I. Kaplan, Chicago;

His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby's, 12 June 1968, lot 1 (as Attributed to Alessandro Allori);

There acquired by the present collector.

When this painting last appeared at auction in 1968, it was sold as “Attributed to Alessandro Allori.” In the catalogue entry for that sale, Federico Zeri is noted as endorsing this attribution and suggesting that the landscape could be by Tobias Verhaecht. The painting is presently recorded in the Fototeca of the Fondazione Federico Zeri as Florentine School, 16th century,¹ and once also was given the name Bronzino. A half-length portrait given to the workshop of Allori of what appears to be the same sitter, once suggested as Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, is today in the Museo di San Paolo in Brazil.²  

Technical images of the present portrait further add to its intrigue and reveal more modern changes to some of the composition’s most prominent elements, including the sitter’s facial features and his costume (he once wore a more tightly fitting vertically striped doublet). While it cannot be completely discounted that a sixteenth century portrait may be beneath the modern overpaint and a thick discolored varnish, this possibility cannot be verified in the painting’s present condition.  

By the first half of the twentieth century, this lot served as a pendant to a portrait of a woman of nearly identical dimensions given to an imitator of Bronzino and today housed in the collections of the Louvre.³

1. Ref. no. 37010

2. Inv. no. MASP.00022, oil on panel, 72.5 by 58.3 cm.

3. Inv. no. MNR 800