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Lot Essay
At the behest of his master, Lambert Lombard, Frans Floris I travelled to Italy in the early 1540s. Following his return to Antwerp around 1545, he established a large studio which included no fewer than 26 assistants, as described by Karel van Mander, Floris' early biographer (the true number of assistants may have been several times that figure).
Studio assistants not only assisted Floris with numerous large-scale commissions for leading patrons like the wealthy Antwerp banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck and the Duke of Aarschot, but were tasked with producing copies and variants of the master's pioneering tronies, or head studies, executed in oil on panel. At least two further versions, one in the Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, and another in a private collection in Schipluiden (for the latter, see E. Wouk, Frans Floris (1519/20-70): Imagining a Northern Renaissance, Leiden and Boston, 2018, p. 227, fig. 6.8) by Floris are known. The present panel exhibits a number of differences from that work, including alterations to the drapery folds and, in its current format, painted additions that enlarge the composition. The model for this painting appears in other tronies by Floris, including the Head of a Sea God (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart) and the Head of a bearded man (Art Institute of Chicago).
Studio assistants not only assisted Floris with numerous large-scale commissions for leading patrons like the wealthy Antwerp banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck and the Duke of Aarschot, but were tasked with producing copies and variants of the master's pioneering tronies, or head studies, executed in oil on panel. At least two further versions, one in the Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, and another in a private collection in Schipluiden (for the latter, see E. Wouk, Frans Floris (1519/20-70): Imagining a Northern Renaissance, Leiden and Boston, 2018, p. 227, fig. 6.8) by Floris are known. The present panel exhibits a number of differences from that work, including alterations to the drapery folds and, in its current format, painted additions that enlarge the composition. The model for this painting appears in other tronies by Floris, including the Head of a Sea God (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart) and the Head of a bearded man (Art Institute of Chicago).