Portrait of Pope Julius II

roman school

copy after Sanzio, Raphael

(Urbino 1483 - Rome 1520)

The painting is a copy of the original by Raphael, which was also part of the Borghese collection until the late 18th century and is now in the National Gallery in London. Its success is attested to by the numerous copies it generated. This Borghese painting came into the collection at a later date. It was attributed in the 19th century to Giulio Romano but is now assigned more generically to Roman circles.

Object details

Commentary

The painting is a copy of Raphael’s original, which is almost unanimously recognised in the panel in the National Gallery London (inv. NG 27), which originally belonged to Cardinal Borghese. Pope Julius II is portrayed in three-quarter length, against a green background and seated on a chair upholstered in red velvet with the back elegantly decorated with fringes and finished with acorn-shaped decorations – the acorn being the heraldic symbol of the della Rovere family (rovere is Italian for oak). He wears a red velvet camauro and mozzetta trimmed with ermine and a white robe of fine pleated fabric. The deeply scarred face framed by the white beard, the careworn expression and the intensely reflective gaze place the execution of the original, believed to have been painted in 1511, at the time of the loss of the city of Bologna to the French and the illness that afflicted the elderly pontiff. And yet, from the gesture of the bejewelled hands, one clasping the armrest, the other elegantly holding a handkerchief, the image of the pontiff, a combination of naturalness and officialdom, signals his power and determination.

The original painting was donated by Julius II to the church of S. Maria del Popolo, under the patronage of the della Rovere family, where the portrait was displayed during solemn celebrations along with another work by the Urbino artist, the celebrated Madonna of Loreto (Chantilly, Musée Condé, inv. 68; Gould 1970; Shearman 2003, p. 945). In 1591, Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, nephew of the newly elected Pope Gregory XIV, acquired the two precious paintings and transferred them to his collection, which was purchased in its entirety by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1608. The portrait remained in the Borghese collection until the end of the 18th century and was marked with the number 118 in the inventory of 1693 (Della Pergola 1965, III, p. 203, no. 448), still visible on the lower edge of the panel – this allowed Gould to identify the provenance of the painting purchased by the National Gallery of London in 1824 (Gould 1970).

The work, first recorded in the Fideicommissary list of 1833, was mentioned in a list of paintings generically referred to by a Borghese archivist as 19th-century acquisitions (Costamagna 2003; Tarissi de Jacobis 2003). More precise information, recently discovered, is currently being printed.

The extraordinary success of Raphael’s creation, which was to be seminal for the history of official portraiture, is attested to by the great number of copies mentioned in various 19th-century sources (Longhena, in Quatremère de Quincy 1829; Platner 1842; Passavant 1860; Gruyer 1881); this does not, however, make it easy to identify the provenance of the work. At the time, the autograph version was generally believed to be the one in the Uffizi Gallery (inv. 1890 no. 1450). Piancastelli (1891) argued that the canvas in the collection was in all likelihood the one seen by Richardson in 1816 in Palazzo Caffarelli (see Longhena 1828, p. 132 in footnote) probably because Cardinal Scipione Borghese, born Caffarelli, belonged to that family. This hypothesis was superseded by Magnanimi (1980, p. 122 Bc), who precisely reconstructed the path of that painting, purchased in 1762 by Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini and now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Galleria Corsini (inv. 134; A. Cosma in Raffaello e l’Antico 2023, pp. 222-223, no. 96).

During the 19th century, the attribution of the canvas remained essentially to Giulio Romano, albeit with some variations of opinion: Platner (1842) attributed the work to him without providing any specific reasons; Passavant (1862) considered it to be of ‘firm but somewhat harsh’ execution, while De Toulgoët (1867) judged it to be a ‘copy of the portrait of Julius II, by Raphael, painted by Giulio Romano, almost as beautiful as the original’; Barbier de Montault simply ascribed it to ‘the painter from Mantua’. Venturi (1893), later backed by Longhi (1928), considered it to be ‘a good, old copy of a Venetian hand ... like the other in the Pitti Gallery, by a Venetian master, with its Titianesque workmanship and strong colouring’ – today effectively recognised as a copy of Titian (Palazzo Pitti, inv. Palatina 79). This did not stop the work from appearing under the name of Raphael in the valuation for sale to the State prepared by Venturi and Piancastelli, but it was valued at a more realistic 5,000 lire, certainly not commensurate with the attribution.  Also in later studies (Della Pergola 1955; Oberhuber 1970; Barberini in Raffaello nelle raccolte Borghese, 1984, p. 55; Meyer zur Capellen 2008), the attribution to Giulio Romano was abandoned. Moreover, the state of conservation of the canvas makes a precise stylistic analysis difficult.

Included in 1833 among the masterpieces of the collection in ‘Note A’ of the Fideicommissary listing, after the transfer of the works to Villa Pinciana, the painting was put in the room devoted to the works of Raphael and his school (Venturi 1893).

Compared to the London panel, in the Borghese painting there is a greater space between the left hand and the right edge of the support. The details of the fringes, whose golden threads look deftly interwoven, are very precise; the reproduction of the rings with extraordinarily large stones is faithful, with minimal variations. The highlights on the velvet of the mozzetta are more pronounced and heightened by white brushstrokes, not to be found in the original. The background, which in the initial version of the London painting featured the motif of the crossed keys – covered over by Raphael himself as he painted to give depth to the angular position of the subject – is flatter in the copy, as is the dark vertical band, accentuated and without shading. It cannot be ruled out, however, that the painting lost its original glaze during previous restoration. It has also recently emerged that the perimeter of the canvas had been covered by substantial repainting, which may have been necessary due to an enlargement of the painting’s dimensions. On the back is an inscription painted with a brush on the original canvas, now covered by a fabric after the re-lining in 1958 by Paolo degli Esposti, but still partly visible, which reads ‘Bar Mattei/ n°. 20’.

Marina Minozzi