An Anatomy Lesson

Circle of Passerotti Bartolomeo

(Bologna 1529 - 1592)

Attributed to Zuccari Federico

(Sant'Angelo in Vado 1542-43 - Ancona 1609)

The painting, first cited in the inventory of 1693 as a work by Francesco Salviati, was later attributed variously to Agostino Carracci, Lucio Massari and Bartolomeo Passerotti; in more recent times it has been associated with Federico Zuccari (S. Angelo in Vado 1539 – Ancona 1609). The work falls within the scope of genre, the figurative precedents of which can be recognised in the ‘kitchen’ and ‘market’ scenes known in Italy through Dutch painting and the output of the Venetian workshop of the Bassano and the Bologna workshop of the Carracci, possibly justifying the old inventory attribution. 

Object details

Commentary

The scene of this Anatomy Lesson, with its somewhat dark and opaque tones, is crowded with figures: on the left is the half-recumbent body of the flayed corpse, surrounded by artists, huddling around it. From the studies of Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2001, pp. 63-84, in particular p. 82), we can identify the people depicted: several artists can be recognised, including Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Daniele da Volterra, Francesco Salviati, Marcantonio Raimondi, Perin del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Andrea del Sarto, Francesco Primaticcio, Parmigianino, Jacopo Sansovino, Giambologna, Baccio Bandinelli, and Federico Zuccari himself, the probable creator of the painting. The work follows the conventions of the genre, with the intriguing co-presence of artists who are not all exactly contemporary with each other but who somehow belong to the same artistic genealogy.

The painting, as noted by Herrmann Fiore (2001, cit.), is recorded in the Borghese collection from the inventory of around 1633: ‘A painting of an Anatomy with a black and gold frame, 1 1/2 wide by Federico Zuccaro’. In the 1693 inventory there is a reference to the number 168 still visible in the bottom left-hand corner, which makes the identification of the painting sound despite the mistaken attribution to Francesco Salviati: ‘A painting of about two palms with an Anatomy with many figures, black frame with a gold border, No. 168 by Cecchin Salviati’. In later inventories the picture is first listed as a work by Agostino Carracci and then by his school, while critics have suggested other possible attributions: Lucio Massari for Venturi (1893, p. 211), Bartolomeo Passerotti for Longhi (1928, p. 222) and Della Pergola (1959, p. 61), an attribution also accepted by Ghirardi (1990), and finally Federico Zuccari for Herrmann Fiore (2001). In the 2018 exhibition in Valladolid, the painting was again credited to the circle of Bartolomeo Passerotti, possibly the author of a drawing now in the Louvre (attributed by some, however, to Zuccari), which appears to be a prototype for the Borghese painting, datable to around the end of the 1570s (Ghirardi 2004, pp. 153-154).

Pier Ludovico Puddu