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Lot Essay
This picture of A Sibyl, by the leading exponent of Mannerism in Renaissance Florence, only came to light at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following a chequered critical history, largely due to its imperfect state, the painting was reinstated as a rare work by Pontormo thirty years ago, following conservation treatment. It constitutes one of the very few pictures by the artist remaining in private hands and was for a long time on deposit at Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, as part of the bequest of the collector and art critic Charles Alexander Loeser (1864-1928).
Turning over her shoulder and looking outside of the picture space with an enigmatic smile, the woman depicted here is intended to represent one of the twelve pagan sibyls (or priestesses) who were said to have foretold the coming of Christ. She is shown here in Renaissance costume, wearing a rose dress with ample sleeves over a white chemise, but her headdress is historicizing and she holds a paper scroll. Sibyls were popular in Italian art and were commonly shown holding books or scrolls, alluding to the sibylline books in which their prophecies were recorded. As noted by Philippe Costamagna in his catalogue raisonné of Pontormo’s works, the figure in this painting calls to mind Michelangelo’s sibyls and prophets in the Sistine Chapel and the artist seems to have drawn inspiration from Leonardo for the sibyl’s enigmatic smile (Costamagna, op. cit., p. 123: ‘il sorriso enigmatico trae indiscutibilmente ispirazione dall’opera di Leonardo’). Indeed, Costamagna goes so far as to say that in this picture Pontormo may have intentionally wanted to make reference to Michelangelo and Leonardo – widely considered the greatest living artists of his time – in a desire to surpass his Florentine contemporary, Andrea del Sarto.
The painting was first published in 1916 by Frederick Mortimer Clapp, first Director of the Frick Collection, but it was not until the 1950s that an attribution to Pontormo was put forward by Carlo Gamba (1956). This was subsequently taken up by the American art historian Bernard Berenson (1963), one of the most important and influential connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings. Since then, reservations have been expressed by some scholars – including Janet Cox Rearick, author of the catalogue of Pontormo’s drawings (1964) – who considered the work to be a copy after a lost original. An alternative attribution to Rosso Fiorentino was proposed by Kurt W. Forster (1965), but this seems not to have been taken up by subsequent authors.
Following the picture’s conservation treatment in 1980, Philippe Costamagna unequivocally accepted the painting as autograph and included it in his corpus of the artist’s works (1994), dating the Sibyl to around 1516. The painting has suffered considerably, making it difficult to judge from photographs. As noted by Costamagna, the better-preserved passages include her left hand, which is reminiscent of that of the Martyr Saint in Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts (Costamagna, op. cit., pp. 111-112, cat. no. 9). The sibyl’s right hand, holding the scroll, is almost identical to that of the male sitter in the Portrait of a pietra dura engraver in Paris, Musée du Louvre (fig. 1; Costamagna, op. cit., pp. 137-38, cat. no. 25), which also shares the half-length format and analogous placement of the figure in the picture space.
Another compelling point of comparison for the sibyl is the Madonna in the Pala Pucci (Madonna and Child with Saints Joseph, John the Evangelist, Francis and James) in the church San Michele Visdomini, Florence (fig. 2). That altarpiece, which is dated 1518, has been described as showing ‘Pontormo’s indebtedness to Leonardo’s Florentine legacy’ and ‘the play of light and shadows that surrounds and shapes the Virgin’ was singled out as being particularly Leonardesque (A. Geremicca, in Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino. Diverging Paths of Mannerism, C. Falciani and A. Natali eds., exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 2014, p. 78, cat. II.2). The Madonna and sibyl both turn to their left, looking back over their shoulder, their head illuminated by a light source that plunges the right side of their face in shadow. The turned head and upturned mouth are both highly effective in animating the sibyl and the Madonna, the latter being the focal point of the Pala Pucci’s pyramidal composition. It was a device that Pontormo returned to for his lost fresco of Saint Cecilia in Fiesole, datable to around 1519, with which a number of drawings have been associated. Cox-Rearick notes, in particular, a connection between the smiling face of the sibyl and a red chalk study of a head in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (Cox-Rearick, op. cit.); an observation upheld by Costamagna who, however, points out that the Sibyl must date from slightly earlier than the Saint Cecilia fresco.
A date of around 1516 for A Sibyl is further substantiated by the fashionable clothing she wears. As noted by Costamagna, both the shirt trim running across the sibyl’s chest and the slits in her sleeves were out of fashion by the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, and similar clothes are to be found in portraits by Andrea del Sarto and Francesco Bachiacca. The swathes of pink fabric dominating the palette and composition of the Sibyl are comparable to those adopted by Pontormo in his Portrait of a Young Man of a few years later in the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi, Lucca (for which see K. Christiansen and C. Falciani, The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512–1570, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021, p. 90, no. 4).
The circumstances surrounding the commission of A Sibyl are unknown. The picture’s first recorded owner was Charles Alexander Loeser, who assembled an impressive collection of Italian drawings, paintings, furniture and decorative arts. His father Frederick Loeser was the founder of a department store in Brooklyn, from which several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century items of clothing are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After completing his studies at Harvard University, Charles Loeser travelled to Italy and, influenced by his fellow student Bernard Berenson, he decided to settle in Florence in 1890. Loeser’s extensive collection, comprising over 1,000 objects, was displayed at Villa Torri Gattaia, a fourteenth-century villa on the slopes of Piazzale Michelangelo, which he had acquired in 1910 (fig. 3). When Loeser died, he bequeathed over 260 old master drawings to the Fogg Art Museum, gave eight Cézanne paintings to the President of the United States ‘to adorn the White House’ and left a selection of artworks to the city of Florence to be displayed in the Palazzo Vecchio as part of the ‘Loeser Bequest’. The rest of the collection remained in situ at Villa Torri Gattaia until the property was sold by Loeser’s daughter in 1959, whereupon the villa’s contents were dispersed and offered at auction in London in December that year. The sale consisted of almost fifty paintings, predominantly of the Italian School and, although Pontormo’s Sibyl was not among them, it included significant works by Gentile da Fabriano, Domenico Beccafumi, Bernardo Daddi, Jacopo del Casentino, Salvator Rosa and Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
Turning over her shoulder and looking outside of the picture space with an enigmatic smile, the woman depicted here is intended to represent one of the twelve pagan sibyls (or priestesses) who were said to have foretold the coming of Christ. She is shown here in Renaissance costume, wearing a rose dress with ample sleeves over a white chemise, but her headdress is historicizing and she holds a paper scroll. Sibyls were popular in Italian art and were commonly shown holding books or scrolls, alluding to the sibylline books in which their prophecies were recorded. As noted by Philippe Costamagna in his catalogue raisonné of Pontormo’s works, the figure in this painting calls to mind Michelangelo’s sibyls and prophets in the Sistine Chapel and the artist seems to have drawn inspiration from Leonardo for the sibyl’s enigmatic smile (Costamagna, op. cit., p. 123: ‘il sorriso enigmatico trae indiscutibilmente ispirazione dall’opera di Leonardo’). Indeed, Costamagna goes so far as to say that in this picture Pontormo may have intentionally wanted to make reference to Michelangelo and Leonardo – widely considered the greatest living artists of his time – in a desire to surpass his Florentine contemporary, Andrea del Sarto.
The painting was first published in 1916 by Frederick Mortimer Clapp, first Director of the Frick Collection, but it was not until the 1950s that an attribution to Pontormo was put forward by Carlo Gamba (1956). This was subsequently taken up by the American art historian Bernard Berenson (1963), one of the most important and influential connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings. Since then, reservations have been expressed by some scholars – including Janet Cox Rearick, author of the catalogue of Pontormo’s drawings (1964) – who considered the work to be a copy after a lost original. An alternative attribution to Rosso Fiorentino was proposed by Kurt W. Forster (1965), but this seems not to have been taken up by subsequent authors.
Following the picture’s conservation treatment in 1980, Philippe Costamagna unequivocally accepted the painting as autograph and included it in his corpus of the artist’s works (1994), dating the Sibyl to around 1516. The painting has suffered considerably, making it difficult to judge from photographs. As noted by Costamagna, the better-preserved passages include her left hand, which is reminiscent of that of the Martyr Saint in Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts (Costamagna, op. cit., pp. 111-112, cat. no. 9). The sibyl’s right hand, holding the scroll, is almost identical to that of the male sitter in the Portrait of a pietra dura engraver in Paris, Musée du Louvre (fig. 1; Costamagna, op. cit., pp. 137-38, cat. no. 25), which also shares the half-length format and analogous placement of the figure in the picture space.
Another compelling point of comparison for the sibyl is the Madonna in the Pala Pucci (Madonna and Child with Saints Joseph, John the Evangelist, Francis and James) in the church San Michele Visdomini, Florence (fig. 2). That altarpiece, which is dated 1518, has been described as showing ‘Pontormo’s indebtedness to Leonardo’s Florentine legacy’ and ‘the play of light and shadows that surrounds and shapes the Virgin’ was singled out as being particularly Leonardesque (A. Geremicca, in Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino. Diverging Paths of Mannerism, C. Falciani and A. Natali eds., exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 2014, p. 78, cat. II.2). The Madonna and sibyl both turn to their left, looking back over their shoulder, their head illuminated by a light source that plunges the right side of their face in shadow. The turned head and upturned mouth are both highly effective in animating the sibyl and the Madonna, the latter being the focal point of the Pala Pucci’s pyramidal composition. It was a device that Pontormo returned to for his lost fresco of Saint Cecilia in Fiesole, datable to around 1519, with which a number of drawings have been associated. Cox-Rearick notes, in particular, a connection between the smiling face of the sibyl and a red chalk study of a head in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (Cox-Rearick, op. cit.); an observation upheld by Costamagna who, however, points out that the Sibyl must date from slightly earlier than the Saint Cecilia fresco.
A date of around 1516 for A Sibyl is further substantiated by the fashionable clothing she wears. As noted by Costamagna, both the shirt trim running across the sibyl’s chest and the slits in her sleeves were out of fashion by the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, and similar clothes are to be found in portraits by Andrea del Sarto and Francesco Bachiacca. The swathes of pink fabric dominating the palette and composition of the Sibyl are comparable to those adopted by Pontormo in his Portrait of a Young Man of a few years later in the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi, Lucca (for which see K. Christiansen and C. Falciani, The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512–1570, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021, p. 90, no. 4).
The circumstances surrounding the commission of A Sibyl are unknown. The picture’s first recorded owner was Charles Alexander Loeser, who assembled an impressive collection of Italian drawings, paintings, furniture and decorative arts. His father Frederick Loeser was the founder of a department store in Brooklyn, from which several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century items of clothing are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After completing his studies at Harvard University, Charles Loeser travelled to Italy and, influenced by his fellow student Bernard Berenson, he decided to settle in Florence in 1890. Loeser’s extensive collection, comprising over 1,000 objects, was displayed at Villa Torri Gattaia, a fourteenth-century villa on the slopes of Piazzale Michelangelo, which he had acquired in 1910 (fig. 3). When Loeser died, he bequeathed over 260 old master drawings to the Fogg Art Museum, gave eight Cézanne paintings to the President of the United States ‘to adorn the White House’ and left a selection of artworks to the city of Florence to be displayed in the Palazzo Vecchio as part of the ‘Loeser Bequest’. The rest of the collection remained in situ at Villa Torri Gattaia until the property was sold by Loeser’s daughter in 1959, whereupon the villa’s contents were dispersed and offered at auction in London in December that year. The sale consisted of almost fifty paintings, predominantly of the Italian School and, although Pontormo’s Sibyl was not among them, it included significant works by Gentile da Fabriano, Domenico Beccafumi, Bernardo Daddi, Jacopo del Casentino, Salvator Rosa and Giuseppe Maria Crespi.