Attributed to Giovanni di Niccolò de Lutero, called Dosso Dossi

Possibly Cardinal Carlo Emanuele Pio di Savoia (1585-1641);

Art market, Rome;

From whom acquired by Sir Archibald Islay Campbell (1825-1866), 3rd Baronet of Succoth, 1857 (according to an inscription on the panel's verso);

Private collection, by 2007;

With Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London (as Dosso Dossi, Self Portrait);

From whom acquired by Aso O. Tavitian, 2008.

K. Morris, in Eye to Eye, European Portraits 1450-1850, exhibition catalogue, R. Rand, K. Morris, and D. Ekserdjian (eds.), Williamstown 2011, pp. 56-59, cat. no. 6, reproduced (as Attributed to Dosso Dossi, circa 1510-1515).

Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450-1850, 23 January - 27 March 2011, no. 6.

In this expressive early-sixteenth-century portrait, a young man wearing a black beretta looks directly at the viewer. His subtly modeled features, sincere expression, and unassuming affect together convey a touchingly personal depiction. The man’s psychological presence evokes portraits by artists including Giorgione and Albrecht Dürer, who produced some of the most elegiac works in this genre.

While the painting’s quality remains irrefutable, scholars continue to debate its attribution. Carlo Falciani, among others, has suggested the portrait is an early work, produced circa 1510, by Dosso Dossi, the leading court artist in sixteenth-century Ferrara.¹ Known primarily for his mythological and religious paintings, Dosso is documented as having produced several portraits, yet this aspect of his oeuvre remains opaque. Mauro Lucco, who has sought to reconstruct Dosso’s work in this genre, has expressed doubt about the painter’s authorship of the present work, which he suggests was instead executed by a Florentine artist close to Franciabigio or Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.²

An inscription on the panel’s verso strongly indicates the painting once formed part of the Pio da Carpi di Savoia family collection.³ Indeed, before relocating to Rome in 1626, Cardinal Carlo Emmanuele Pio di Savoia lived in Ferrara, where he acquired several works by Dosso and his younger brother, Battista. An inventory drawn up two years before the cardinal’s move lists six works ascribed to "Dossi"; a subsequent 1689 inventory includes fourteen.⁴ According to a second inscription on the panel’s verso, the English connoisseur Sir Archibald Islay Campbell acquired the painting in 1857 in Rome, where the Pio di Savoia collection was dispersed.⁵

¹ K. Morris 2011, p. 56.

² Ibid.

³ The inscription reads: “Pio [1]26 / 136.”

⁴ B. Fredericksen, “Collecting Dosso: The Trail of Dosso’s Painting from the Late Sixteenth Century Onwards, in Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, L. Ciammitti, S. F. Ostrow, and S. Settis (eds.), Los Angeles 1998, p. 377.

⁵ The partly illegible nineteenth-century inscription appears to read: "St. Francis Borgia / Brought from Rome by / Sir Archibald Islay Campbell and presented / to Mrs H[...] [...] on May 18 1857 / John Key."