Description:
Close-up full-face portrait of young man wearing a soft cap
Label Text:
The attribution of this sheet, one of the most problematic in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum collection, has long confounded scholars. Although many have suggested that it is done in the sixteenth-century Florentine manner, the identity of the artist has remained elusive. Technically similar to the Volterrano drawing in this exhibition, the sheet exemplifies the high quality of drawing found in Florentine Renaissance works.
It has recently been suggested that this portrait may have been drawn by the Florentine painter Pier Francesco Foschi. Foschi, an artist of the Mannerist era, was a student of Andrea del Sarto. Many of Foschi’s surviving paintings are portraits whose subjects typically exhibit a penetrating gaze not unlike that seen in this sheet. The scarcity of published drawings by Foschi makes a definite assignment to him difficult, but the technical style and the treatment of the subject provide strong evidence for the attribution. This sheet is likely a preparatory study for a commissioned portrait yet, as with so many portraits from the Renaissance, the identity of the sitter is unknown. The costuming of the figure, in particular the cap, indicates that the sitter may have been a tradesman or merchant.
The origins of portraiture itself can be found in antiquity: portraits were painted for the lids of mummy cases in ancient Egypt, and likenesses of Roman rulers were depicted on coins, and in busts and life-sized sculpture. During the Middle Ages, portraiture essentially disappeared and was not revived until the 15th century with the onset of the Renaissance and a new interest in humanism. In this work, we see how, with the revival of classical ideas, portraiture was no longer reserved exclusively for influential members of society, but available to individuals across all ranks of society. Rather than simply trying to reproduce a visual likeness of the sitter, Renaissance artists sought to capture the essence of the individual, as is demonstrated in this sheet. Portraiture became a means by which a sitter’s image might be recorded, a tangible remnant that might survive beyond his lifetime.
(A.B.B. 2007)
Tags:
portraits; men; hats Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1999.16.3 |
