Baldassarre Franceschini, called Il Volterrano

A Guardian Angel and a Child

17th Century

Provenance: with Leo Blumenreich and Julius Böhler, Munich, 1924 Dr. Frederic Goldstein Oppenheimer (1881-1963), San Antonio, Texas; by whom given to: Abraham M. Adler, New York, until 1985; thence by descent to the present owners While old inscriptions on the verso of this panel propose its author to be Hans Holbein and the sitter Sir John More—a lawyer, judge, and the father of Sir Thomas More—this fine portrait has long been recognized to be by a Flemish hand. Max Friedländer gave the painting to Bernard van Orley (1487/1491 – 1541) in 1924, but did not include it in the volume dedicated to the artist in his Early Netherlandish Paintings...

Provenance: Bradley Collection. Private Collection, Upperville, Virginia. Literature: Katlijne van der Stighelen and Hans Vlieghe, Rubens: Portraits of Unidentified and Newly Identified Sitters painted in Antwerp, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, vol. 19, pt. 3, London and Turnhout, 2021, under cat. no. 189, p. 161, and fig. 75. This painting had previously been considered to be by an anonymous Tuscan painter of the sixteenth century in the orbit of Agnolo Bronzino. While the painting does in fact demonstrate a striking formal and compositional similarity to Bronzino’s portraits—compare the nearly identical pose of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 1)—its style is completely foreign to Italian works of the period. That it is painted on an oak panel is further indication of its non-Italian origin. This portrait can in fact be confidently attributed to the Antwerp artist Huybrecht Beuckelaer. Huybrecht, the brother of Joachim Beuckelaer, has only recently been identified as the author of a distinct body of work formerly grouped under the name of the “Monogrammist HB.” In recent studies by Kreidl, Wolters, and Bruyn his remarkable career has been delineated: from its beginnings with Joachim in the workshop of Pieter Aertsen; to his evident travels to Italy where, it has been suggested, he came into contact with Bronzino’s paintings; to his return to Antwerp, where he seems to have assisted Anthonis Mor in painting costume in portraits; to his independent work in Antwerp (where he entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1579); and, later to his career in England where, known as “Master Hubberd,” he was patronized by the Earl of Leicester. Our painting was recently published by Dr. Katlijne van der Stighelen and Dr. Hans Vlieghe in a volume of the Corpus Rubenianum, in which they write that the painting “has a very Italian air about it and fits convincingly within [Beuckelaer’s] oeuvre.” Stighelen and Vlieghe compare the painting with Peter Paul Ruben’s early Portrait of a Man, Possibly an Architect or Geographer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which the sitter holds a compass and wears a similarly styled doublet (Fig. 2). Huybrecht both outlived and travelled further afield than his brother Joachim, who made his career primarily in Antwerp. Whereas Joachim was the main artistic inheritor of their uncle and teacher, Pieter Aertson, working in similar style and format as a specialist in large-scale genre and still-life paintings, Huybrecht clearly specialized as a painter of portraits and was greatly influenced by the foreign artists and works he encountered on his travels. His peripatetic life and his distinctly individual hand undoubtedly contributed to the fact his career and artistic output have only recently been rediscovered and reconstructed. His periods abroad seem to have overlapped with the mature phase of his brother Joachim’s career, who enrolled in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke much earlier than his brother, establishing himself as an independent painter in 1560. Joachim’s activity was confined to the following decade and half, and his latest work dates from the last year of his life, 1574. Our portrait was likely produced in the late 1560s, a dating supported by the dendrochronological investigation performed by Dr. Peter Klein, which established that it is painted on an oak panel with an earliest felling date of 1558 and with a fabrication date of ca. 1566. This painting presents a portrait of an artist, almost certainly Huybrecht’s self-portrait. The young sitter is confidently posed in a striking patterned white doublet with a wide collar and an abundance of buttons. He stands with his right arm akimbo, his exaggerated hands both a trademark of Huybrecht and his brother Joachim’s art, as well as a possible reference to the “hand of the artist.” The figure peers out of the painting, interacting intimately and directly with the viewer, as we witness him posed in an interior, the tools and results of his craft visible nearby. He holds a square or ruler in his left hand, while a drawing compass...

Provenance: Suida-Manning Collection, New York Private Collection Exhibited: Venetian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century, Finch College Museum of Art, New York, October 30-December 15, 1963, no. 31. Veronese & His Studio in North American Collections, Birmingham Museum of Art, Oct. 1-Nov. 15, 1972, and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Dec. 5-Dec. 31, 1972 Literature: Robert L. Manning, A Loan Exhibition of Venetian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century, exh. cat. New York 1963, cat. no. 31ill., as by Veronese Stephen Clayton and Edward Weeks, eds., introduction by David Rosand, Veronese & His Studio in North American Collections, Birmingham 1972, as by Veronese, p. 38 ill. Terisio Pignatti, Veronese, Venice 1976, I, p. 199, cat. no. A225, II, fig. 908, as attributed to Veronese Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese; catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence 1991, no. 54°, as attributed to Veronese. Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese, Milan 1995, II, pp. 517-518ill., cat. no. A 56, under attributed paintings, by Veronese and workshop) John Garton, Grace and Grandeur; The Portraiture of Paolo Veronese, London-Turnhout 2008, p. 237, fig. 77, cat. no. R16, as workshop of Veronese. Scarsellino’s art is widely regarded as critical link between the Renaissance and the Baroque styles in Emilian painting; not only was he an important transmitter of the heritage of the Renaissance, but he was also open to innovative ideas, and was one of the earliest to experiment with the trend to naturalism that would become fundamental to art of the new century. Born around 1550, he received his earliest training from his father Sigismondo, an architect and painter; it was probably while working at his father’s side as a youth that he acquired the nickname Scarsellino, or “little Scarsella”. After absorbing the principles of his art in Ferrara and Parma, he went to Venice in 1570, staying for four years and working in the shop of Veronese. In the following decade, his art —especially in terms of its piety and its development of landscape— demonstrates a strong sympathy with that of the Carracci, with whom he worked in 1592-1593 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Maria Angela Novelli and later Alessandra Frabetti both propose that Scarsellino traveled to Rome, although such a trip has not been documented; if he did travel to Rome, it probably would have occurred during the years that Scarsellino’s colleagues Agostino and Annibale Carracci were there, that is, beginning in 1595 and until 1609. The last decades of Scarsellino’s career again involve stylistic experimentation, this time in a manner that would bring his work very close to the progressive figurative naturalism of Carlo Bononi and prepare the way for Guercino. The present portrait of a distinguished gentleman had been long thought to be by Paolo Veronese and was in fact attributed to him by such distinguished connoisseurs as Adolfo Venturi and Wilhelm Suida. The portrait’s style is, however, distinct from Veronese’s, although clearly indebted to it, and the attribution to the young Scarsellino is wholly convincing. The painting would then date from the 1570s – a date confirmed by the costume the subject wears. The puffed hat that appears in the painting had a rather short-lived vogue in the early 1570s. One sees it in Giambattista Moroni’s Portrait of Count...

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