Portrait of Dominican friar (Saint Dominic)

Vecellio Titian

(Pieve di Cadore 1488-90 - Venice 1576)

The provenance is the Roman collection of Cardinal Girolamo Bernerio. It arrived at an unspecified time in the Borghese collection, where it appeared in 1693. The work shows the stylistic features of the artist’s later period, and depicts a figure (alternately considered to be St Dominic, St Vincent Ferrer or a Dominican friar) wearing the usual habit of preaching friars, a white cassock and black cloak. The ray of light that strikes the cassock illuminates the outstretched hand in a symbolic gesture. The face is an example of Titian’s superb portraiture. In the last years of his life, he experimented with an absolutely innovative technique, a minimalist painting style characterised by rapid brushstrokes with an almost impressionistic touch.

Object details

Commentary

There are no reports of the painting until the early 17th century, when it was already in Rome. The quotation “a painting of St Dominic with a gilded frame by Titian”, taken from the inventory of the collection of Girolamo Bernerio (or Bernieri) drawn up by Carlo Saraceni in August 1611, a few days after the death of Cardinal d’Ascoli, as Bernerio was known (Schütze, 1999, p. 261, no. 28), is in fact by now safely referred to it. 261, no. 28). Bernerio may have found it on the Roman market - which recorded great interest in Titian’s works in the late 16th and early 17th centuries - or directly in Venice, which he had travelled through in 1598 on his way to Ferrara in the retinue of Clement VIII. The fact that Bernerio’s picture gallery, which was publicly put up for sale not even a month after the date of the inventory, includes a certain body of works that later became part of the Borghese collection, suggests that Scipione may have acquired them there. However, the painting is not mentioned in the earliest documents and inventory records related to the Borghese collection, perhaps because, at least until the end of the 19th century, it was always in the city palace. In fact, neither Manilli nor Montelatici (who refer to the villa outside Porta Pinciana) mention it. It does however appear in the inventory of 1693: here, as “Dominican Saint”, it appears to be located in room (V) of the Udienza, and remains there throughout the 18th century, as well as much of the following century. In 1833, it is generically recorded as a painting of the Venetian school, but the Titian authorship has rarely been questioned (Wethey). On the contrary: from the second half of the 19th century until after World War II, the work, always dated to Titian’s later years, enjoyed a certain critical success. During his stay in Rome in the late 1850s, Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle noted a few works from the Borghese collection that he may have seen in the palace: the “San Domenico”, as he called it, is one of them (Cavalcaselle, c. 1859, 47v). From this, he drew a sketch and added notes in the margins, which were included in the monograph produced in collaboration with Archer Crowe: the brush stroke and grandiose style were praised, and the hypothesis was put forward, literally taken up by Venturi (1893), that it was a portrait “made from life” (Cavalcaselle - Crowe, 1878). It is no coincidence that Morelli already refers to the painting, which he ascribes to the “old Titian”, a quotation from Ridolfi (1648) according to which the painter had made a portrait “of his Confessor, of the Order of Preachers”, adding that “it was among Gamberato’s things”. This indication, which finds no basis in the current state of research, is replicated by Giulio Cantalamessa in his handwritten notes for Venturi’s catalogue (1907, no. 188). Here, aside from dwelling on the quality of the painting, all based “on the touch”, he writes about the face, “the seal of a chosen and pre-established individuality, that is, of a man who really lived”. In fact, the painting has been variously interpreted as St Dominic (in the Borghese inventory citations), or as Titian’s Dominican confessor, or again, from the 1930s onwards, as St Vincent Ferrer: identifications that find their substance in the fact that they always emphasise the steadfast nature of the character, his humilitas (Herrmann Fiore 2007), the minimal chromatic range - reduced to black and white and the dark ochre of the background - and the skillful, and therefore modern, alternation between light and shadow. These considerations also led to the hypothesis of a possible commission in the Dominican convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, for which Titian is also said to have painted a Last Supper that no longer exists (Pallucchini, 1969; Gentili, 2012): what is certain is that, at least as far as we know, Titian only painted such a subject on this one occasion, where the rhetorical gesture which also serves to identify the saint (due to the barely perceptible halo), the clothes worn by a real person, the index finger pointing upwards, are all well accentuated. It is no coincidence that this figure has come close to the St John the Baptist now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia: like him, it uses the code of the rhetorician, and the preacher; like him, it is a figure with a strong humility and moral vigour. Unlike him, however, in producing a painting “in economy and freedom” (Gentili, 2012), the older Titian uses a reduced palette: he resets the landscape and background to zero, relies on a sort of reddish-brown monochrome to focus on a face full of meaning, framed by the hood of a black cloak that brings out the well-delineated features of a man aware of his faith.

Maria Giovanna Sarti