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Lot Essay
Best known today for his monumental narrative cycles painted for Venetian devotional confraternities (scuole), Vittore Carpaccio was also celebrated in his lifetime as a portrait painter. Giorgio Vasari praised Carpaccio in his Lives of the Artists (1550/1568) for his 'portraits from life'. During Carpaccio’s lifetime, the Tuscan poet Girolama Corsi Ramos composed a sonnet about his portrait of her, admiring how it 'seemed about to speak' ('per far la lingua pronta parlare'; cited in P. Humfrey, 'The Portrait in Fifteenth-Century Venice', in K. Christiansen and S. Weppelmann, eds., The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 2011, p. 61). Though our understanding of Carpaccio’s work in the genre is limited by the lack of surviving independent portraits by his hand, the numerous portraits that populate his narrative and religious paintings in the form of participants and donors bear witness to his achievement in this field, confirming that alongside the Bellinis and later Titian and Giorgione, Carpaccio played a critical role in the development of Venetian Renaissance portraiture.
The present painting constitutes an exciting discovery, having been virtually unknown to scholars until its recent reemergence. A young man is portrayed in a verdant landscape with two deer and a river in the distance. His stylish haircut and formal red Venetian toga signal that he is a gentleman of not inconsiderable wealth and standing, though his identity is otherwise uncertain. He places his hands against his chest in a gesture of veneration, while directing his solemn gaze upward. The brilliant blue swath of drapery that runs along the left edge suggests the presence of an additional figure, likely the Virgin Mary, next to whom the sitter would have knelt before this painting became a fragment.
The painting was included in Bernard Berenson’s 1968 Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, where it was listed as ‘homeless’ and given an erroneous attribution to Andrea Solario (loc. cit.), though it seems unlikely that this attribution came from Berenson himself as the book was published nine years after his death and photographs of the work in his archives at Villa I Tatti, Florence, are not annotated by his hand. The portrait recently sold in France, with a generic attribution to an artist of the 'Italian School, c. 1500'. Mattia Vinco was the first to recognize the painting as an early work by Vittore Carpaccio (written correspondence, on the basis of photographs, March 2023), and this attribution was endorsed soon thereafter by Peter Humfrey (written correspondence, on the basis of photographs, March 2023).
As Vinco and Humfrey observe, the attribution to Carpaccio is confirmed by the treatment of the landscape, with its high horizon line and tightly arranged tufts of grass that are entirely characteristic of the artist’s paintings from around 1490. Similar flora and fauna can be found, for instance, in the background of Carpaccio's Meditation on the Passion of 1490 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the somewhat later Madonna and Child of around 1505/10 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Both Vinco and Humfrey have further noted the compelling resemblance of the sitter in the present portrait to the bearded saint seen to the right of Christ in the Salvator Mundi with four saints in the Fondazione Luciano e Agnese Sorlini, Carzago di Calvagese (fig. 1), who similarly is depicted in three-quarter profile, with a strong nose, arched eyebrows and almond-shaped eyes that gaze upwardly in adoration.
Turning to the question of the format of the original painting from which the fragment was removed, Vinco and Humfrey agree that the scale suggests that it was intended for private devotion, rather than for use as an altarpiece. Humfrey observes that the proximity of the donor to the Virgin may indicate that the painting was vertically oriented (like the great majority of domestic Madonnas), and as such may not have included other figures. Vinco, however, considering the presumptive vast landscape in the background, suggests the possibility of a horizontal orientation, and proposes that the original painting would have likely included another donor or saints shown in half-length as a sacra conversazione. The decision to situate these holy figures in a vast landscape in this manner may have been inspired by the innovations of Giovanni Bellini, seen in works such as his c. 1480 Saint Francis in Ecstasy (The Frick Collection, New York), as well as the paintings of Andrea Mantegna. Vinco explores the development of this iconography as it relates to the present painting in a forthcoming publication.
We are grateful to Keith Christiansen for his assistance in researching this lot, as well as to Mattia Vinco and Peter Humfrey for respectively suggesting and endorsing the attribution to Vittore Carpaccio, and for generously sharing their scholarship on this painting.
The present painting constitutes an exciting discovery, having been virtually unknown to scholars until its recent reemergence. A young man is portrayed in a verdant landscape with two deer and a river in the distance. His stylish haircut and formal red Venetian toga signal that he is a gentleman of not inconsiderable wealth and standing, though his identity is otherwise uncertain. He places his hands against his chest in a gesture of veneration, while directing his solemn gaze upward. The brilliant blue swath of drapery that runs along the left edge suggests the presence of an additional figure, likely the Virgin Mary, next to whom the sitter would have knelt before this painting became a fragment.
The painting was included in Bernard Berenson’s 1968 Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, where it was listed as ‘homeless’ and given an erroneous attribution to Andrea Solario (loc. cit.), though it seems unlikely that this attribution came from Berenson himself as the book was published nine years after his death and photographs of the work in his archives at Villa I Tatti, Florence, are not annotated by his hand. The portrait recently sold in France, with a generic attribution to an artist of the 'Italian School, c. 1500'. Mattia Vinco was the first to recognize the painting as an early work by Vittore Carpaccio (written correspondence, on the basis of photographs, March 2023), and this attribution was endorsed soon thereafter by Peter Humfrey (written correspondence, on the basis of photographs, March 2023).
As Vinco and Humfrey observe, the attribution to Carpaccio is confirmed by the treatment of the landscape, with its high horizon line and tightly arranged tufts of grass that are entirely characteristic of the artist’s paintings from around 1490. Similar flora and fauna can be found, for instance, in the background of Carpaccio's Meditation on the Passion of 1490 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the somewhat later Madonna and Child of around 1505/10 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Both Vinco and Humfrey have further noted the compelling resemblance of the sitter in the present portrait to the bearded saint seen to the right of Christ in the Salvator Mundi with four saints in the Fondazione Luciano e Agnese Sorlini, Carzago di Calvagese (fig. 1), who similarly is depicted in three-quarter profile, with a strong nose, arched eyebrows and almond-shaped eyes that gaze upwardly in adoration.
Turning to the question of the format of the original painting from which the fragment was removed, Vinco and Humfrey agree that the scale suggests that it was intended for private devotion, rather than for use as an altarpiece. Humfrey observes that the proximity of the donor to the Virgin may indicate that the painting was vertically oriented (like the great majority of domestic Madonnas), and as such may not have included other figures. Vinco, however, considering the presumptive vast landscape in the background, suggests the possibility of a horizontal orientation, and proposes that the original painting would have likely included another donor or saints shown in half-length as a sacra conversazione. The decision to situate these holy figures in a vast landscape in this manner may have been inspired by the innovations of Giovanni Bellini, seen in works such as his c. 1480 Saint Francis in Ecstasy (The Frick Collection, New York), as well as the paintings of Andrea Mantegna. Vinco explores the development of this iconography as it relates to the present painting in a forthcoming publication.
We are grateful to Keith Christiansen for his assistance in researching this lot, as well as to Mattia Vinco and Peter Humfrey for respectively suggesting and endorsing the attribution to Vittore Carpaccio, and for generously sharing their scholarship on this painting.