Portrait of a Man (Mercurio Bua ?)

Lotto Lorenzo

(Venice 1480 - Loreto 1557)

The subject, long believed to be a self-portrait of the artist, is depicted inside an closed room, the back wall of which is punctuated by a window open to a landscape showing the contours of a city and a chivalric scene. The gentleman is wearing a black garment against which his hands stand out prominently; his right hand is resting on a still life composed of a pile of rose and jasmine petals among which a small skull stands out. Some studies suggest that the person portrayed might be Count Mercurio Bua, of Greek origin. He became a military commander in Venice and moved with his retinue to Treviso, a city whose outline can be discerned in the background of the landscape. The depiction of St George, shown with the dragon in the landscape, is related to the leader’s Greek origins, devoted to the knight saint. The situation of mourning, recalled by the two wedding rings, the black robes, and the green table cover, a colour adopted during mourning, is fully reflected in the events of his life. These are marked by the deaths of his two wives and two sons, one of whom, to whom the small skull perhaps alludes, was begotten by his first, beloved consort and who died while still in swaddling clothes.

Object details

Commentary

The subject is depicted inside a closed room, the back wall of which is punctuated by a window opening onto a landscape where the contours of a city and a chivalric scene can be seen.

In the Borghese inventory of 1790, the painting is recorded under the name of Pordenone, and it remained so until Mündler suggested in 1869 that the artist might be Lorenzo Lotto (Mündler 1869, p. 58). The painting was also previously mentioned under the name Pordenone (Inv., 1693, St. V, no. 34), without any information on the portrayed subject. Despite this, Della Pergola believed the subject could be a self-portrait by Lorenzo Lotto, recognising it as the one first listed in the collection of Ippolito Aldobrandini in 1611 (Della Pergola 1955, I, p. 117; Castria Marchetti 2006), later included in the estate of his niece Olimpia Aldobrandini in 1638. In fact, the inventory drawn up in 1682 mentions “a canvas portrait painting of Lorenzo Lotti, about four palms high, by the same hand as said Inventory No. 246 and that of Sig.r Card.le Carta 125” (Della Pergola, 1955, pp. 117-118). Olimpia’s subsequent marriage, first to Paolo Borghese and on his death to Camillo Pamphilj, was the basis on which the noblewoman’s inheritance was divided between her two sons, Gian Battista Borghese and Gian Battista Pamphilj. In addition to the inventory notation, Della Pergola’s proposal is also based on the presumed resemblance to Lotto’s likeness in the woodcut contained in the first edition of Carlo Ridolfi’s Meraviglie dell’arte [The Wonders of Art]  in 1648.

The thesis was later rejected on iconographic grounds by Gentili (Gentili, Ricciardi 1988, pp. 415-424) who believed that the rings worn on the man’s little finger had to do with widowhood, therefore contradicting Lotto’s life story.

Puppi has proposed, with little success, that the subject could be the occult philosopher Giulio Camillo Delminio, whom Lotto spent time with in Venice (Puppi 1981, p. 398). The gentleman, whose expression exudes a feeling of poignant melancholy, wears a black garment, against which his hands stand out prominently: he holds one, with two wedding rings on the little finger, as mentioned, at his side; the other, with a ring on the thumb bearing a cruciform coat-of-arms on a blue field, rests on a symbolic still life composed of a small pile of rose and jasmine petals, among which a small skull stands out. According to Maria Luisa Ricciardi’s study (1989, pp. 85-106), the subject portrayed is Count Mercurio Bua, an Albanian military leader at service of the Serenissima (Venice), who had moved with his retinue to Treviso, a city suggested to be represented in the background of the landscape. There, the condottiere founded a chapel dedicated to St George in Santa Maria Maggiore, and was eventually buried there.

The Eastern origins of the subject explains the devotion to St George, a warrior saint depicted with the dragon in the landscape. According to Béguin’s thesis (Le siécle 1993), the situation of mourning, recalled by the two wedding rings, the black robes and the green table cover, the colour adopted at the time in such circumstances, would be fully reflected in the events of his life, marked by the death of his two wives, the first, Maria Boccali, in 1524, and the second, Elisabetta dei Balbi, shortly afterwards. Added to these are the deaths of two other children, one born to his first, beloved wife and who died while still in swaddling clothes. The presence of the skull could allude to the painful loss or to a more generic allusion to the transience of life, thus serving as a memento mori.

A date for the painting is generally considered to be around 1530 (Banti-Boschetto 1953, p. 84; Zampetti 1953, p. 136; 1980, p. 178, no. 48; Mariani Canova 1975, p. 113; Caroli in Lorenzo Lotto 1998, p. 198).

A different interpretation of the iconographic elements was proposed by Lucco (1994, pp. 45-46) and Humfrey (1997, pp. 136-138; 1998, pp. 197-199, no. 42), who believed the birth of Mercurio Bua in 1478 to be inconsistent with the age of the subject, around 1535. According to Humfrey, the subject is not the Albanian leader, but a commander encountered by the artist between 1533 and 1539, whose name would be related to that of the warrior saint in the background (Falomir Faus 2018, p. 298). The identity of the work with the one listed in the Aldobrandini inventory is also called into question, as the one in the collection is not “about four palms high”, corresponding to about ninety centimetres, but larger. Finally, the scholar notes how the landscape, when no longer associated with the name of Mercurio Bua, is no longer a concrete city, but rather an evocation of Silena, a Libyan town, where the episode of St George freeing the princess is traditionally placed.

In regard to the dating of the work, critics range between 1529 (Della Pergola, 1955, pp. 117-118), around 1530 (Banti, Boschetto 1953; Berenson 1955; Mariani Canova 1975; Caroli 1980), early 1530s (Lucco 1994), 1535 (Humfrey 1997, pp. 136-137; Syson 2008, pp. 14 -31) and the early 1540s (Béguin 1993, pp. 497-498).

Fabrizio Carinci