Bust of a Youth

Savoldo Giovanni Girolamo

(Brescia c. 1480 - Venice? after 1548)

The lack of any clues in this portrait makes it impossible to identify its subject. It entered the Borghese Collection at a late date; the Inventario Fidecommissario listed it as a work by Titian, yet critics later attributed it to Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo of Brescia. It was executed in the 1630s, the period in which the painter blended the figurative culture of Lombardy with the motifs and chromatic schemes of the Veneto school, looking in particular to the examples of the master from Pieve di Cadore.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this work is still unknown. It is only documented with certainty in the collection of Casino di Porta Pinciana from 1833, when it was mistakenly described as a work by Pier Francesco Mola (Inventario Fidecommissario 1833). Paolo della Pergola (1955) suggested that the work corresponded to the entry in the Borghese inventory of 1790 of a ‘head of a shepherd, by Tiziano’. Yet her proposal was rejected by later critics (see Santolini 1998; Hermann Fiore 2006).

With regard to the question of attribution, for some time the painting was held to be by Giovanni Battista Moroni and was displayed as such in the Galleria Borghese (see Della Pergola 1959). As early as 1880, however, Giovanni Morelli rightly ascribed the work to Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo of Brescia. Agreeing with this attribution and building on the suggestion of Venturi (1893), D’Achiardi (1912) argued that the canvas was a preliminary study for the figure of John the Evangelist in the lost Deposition (1573), formerly held in Berlin. This extremely fascinating hypothesis was accepted by Paola della Pergola (1955), who on the occasion of the publication of the catalogue of paintings of the Galleria Borghese in 1955 presented the work as by the artist from Brescia, noting the similarities in the melancholic execution of the face with the Young Peasant Man of the Contini-Bonacossi collection in Florence.

While most critics (Longhi 1928; Venturi 1928; Suida 1935; Gilbert 1986) dated the canvas to before 1537, Rossana Bossaglia (1963) proposed that it was executed immediately after the Deposition, maintaining that together with the Prophet of the Gussalli collection in Milan and the so-called Portrait in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna the Portrait of the Borghese Collection reveals Savoldo’s pictorial itinerary as he gradually moved closer to the freer idiom of Venetian painting: transitioning from a manner marked by Germanic influences – evident in the work in Vienna – to a softer, rounder style, his development culminated in the work in question, one which looks toward trends in Venice, Titian in particular (see Begni Redona 1970).

In the words of De Rinaldis (1935), the painting shows ‘a prevalence of soft, transparent shadows over areas illuminated by dazzling twilight’. In a narrow space it depicts a young man in three-quarter profile set against a dark background while he leans slightly toward the observer. The close-up perspective, pose and use of silvery light (Santolini 1998) are undoubtedly indicative of Savoldo’s response to the enticements of Venetian culture. At the same time – as Boschetto (1963) emphasised – the work represents a departure from the style of Giorgione, whose idiom is more dramatic and less introspective compared to that of the painter from Brescia. The painting, which may have been trimmed on its right side, has been variously interpreted: while some scholars have seen it as a portrait from life of an unknown patron perhaps belonging to the circle of Gasparo Contarini (see Begni Redona 1990), others have proposed that it is a John the Evangelist (Venturi 1893; D’Achiardi 1912; Gilbert 1986); although both suggestions are valid, neither has been supported by documentary evidence.

Antonio Iommelli