The mystery of the Venetian gentleman, part four

Continued from here, here and here with National Gallery of Art curator David Alan Brown.

I think I first noticed Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman in the NGA's collection galleries because of the rakish angle of the sitter's head. It almost looked as if the painter was trying to paint the sitter both in profile -- the form of portraiture that was en vogue for most of the 15th-century and in three-quarter profile, which replaced the profile in the last decades of the 15thC and early in the 16thC. The NGA's Venetian Gentleman is believed to have been painted around 1510. Given that Brown had discussed nearly every possible detail about the painting except the head, I asked him about it.

"Yes," Brown said. "It's a clue as far as the attribution goes. As far as I'm concerned, the head is tilted back in a way that you get this particular reading of the expression..." Brown trailed off as he turned his head and tilted it back so as to mimic the pose of our mysterious Venetian. "So it's a clue. But I don't think the painter was trying to meld profiles with three-quarter poses. He was just painting the way he painted portraits during this period of his career -- and that's the key."

Brown re-opened his manila folder and showed me several other paintings (several of which are reproduced here.) Then he pulled out a book and tapped the cover. "I believe it's by Cariani
he said. "Look at the pose. There are many, many examples of this pose."

Cariani (1490-1547) painted in Venice and Bergamo during the years that Titian dominated Venice. Cariani seems likely to have trained with Bellini and later with Giorgione. His masterpiece may be a painting called A Concert (c1518-20), which happens to be in the National Gallery of Art's collection. It hangs about 20 yards from where Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman is installed now, in the NGA's Tullio Lombardo exhibition.

Brown and I took turns looking from the reproductions back up at the Venetian gentleman. Brown opened a Cariani monograph and turned to some pre-selected pages. One of them was Cariani's Lady Behind a Parapet [c1510s, at top of post] from the Szepmuveszeti in Budapest. Another was Portrait of a Young Girl as St. Agatha from the National Gallery of Scotland [1516-17, above right] in Edinburgh. In both portraits a girl is painted in three-quarter profile, with her nose bisecting her right eye, just as the Venetian gentleman is. The girl in the Scotland painting also seems to be painted as if from below, as if her head were slightly tossed back, just like the sitter in the NGA painting.

Brown pointed to two other Cariani portraits that featured the heads tossed back at an angle: Lute Player [1515-16, below] at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg and La Schiavona (1520) at the Pinacoteca dell'Accademia Carrara-Bergamo. It was a pose that Cariani didn't restrict to portraits, either. Two figures in Cariani's Four Courtesans (c1519), which is in a private collection in Bergamo, feature the pose as does a Virgin Entrhoned with Angels and Saints at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan as well as the central figure in the NGA's own Cariani, A Concert [at bottom].

"What this tells you is that if all these different people have the same expression, it's not an expression that's proper to them, it's one that's been imposed on them by the artist," Brown said, tapping one of the pages of a Cariani monograph for emphasis. "They may have been quite surprised. The man who was portrayed here at the National Gallery may have been mild-mannered and surprised to see himself presented here in this way. I think that's true of a lot of these early 16thC portraits where this gloss was put over them. The fact that it's used for women even shows that it's something the artist is imposing on the sitter.

"I think that we have to beware of assuming that the sitter was an angry soldier or a greedy merchant based on the facial of expression. I think it's a fascinating case of attribution as interpretation."

For good measure, Brown showed me that the Venetian gentleman's mysterious clenched fist was 'reprised' in at least one other Cariani portrait, the fantastic picture of Francesco Albani (c1517-20) at the National Gallery in London.

For now the National Gallery still officially lists the painting as a 'Giorgione and Titian' in its online catalogue and as a 16thC Venetian on its wall-plate. Brown says that he's not quite ready to publish his new attribution -- he's busy with a lecture on Leonardo he'll be delivering soon in Europe -- but that he expects that the painting will be listed as a Cariani when the NGA publishes its next Italian systematic catalogue.

"It's not a sterile debate about who did a painting that's 500-years-old," Brown said. "It's about how we look at paintings and how we read them and the kind of evidence we look for when we want to make statements about them and the difference in reading this evidence whether it's a facial expression or the evidence of x-rays. It's kind of our attempt to understand the signals or the messages that were put into this picture 500 years ago. It's fraught with complications and difficulties -- and yet there are strong human motivations behind it.

"We all know about the need to read people's faces from caveman times onwards and also the desire for some kind of scientific proof. Our age in particular looks to science as the answer to all these things. Look at medical diagnosis, for example. That can depend on the reading of science. What the x-ray does or the CT scan -- or whatever -- provides you with is helpful, but it doesn't in itself contain solutions These things always have to be read."