Lorenzo Lotto (Venice 1480-1556 Loreto)

Portrait of a young man, half-length, in a brown mantle and a dark cap, a letter in his hands

Details

Lorenzo Lotto (Venice 1480-1556 Loreto)
Portrait of a young man, half-length, in a brown mantle and a dark cap, a letter in his hands
inscribed 'Conte....' (lower left, on the letter)
oil on panel
13 x 10 in. (33 x 26 cm.)

Provenance

Anon. Sale, Parke-Benet, New York, 11 January 1956, lot 6, as Bacchiacca ($2,000 to Newhouse Galleries as agent for Bruno Lorenzelli, Bergamo, from whom purchased by the Museum as Lorenzo Lotto in 1963).
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Christie's, New York, 12 January 1994, lot 143, as 'circle of Jacopo del Conte'.

Literature

L. Nikolenko, Francesco Ubertini, called Il Bacchiacca, 1966, p. 55, fig. 59, as Bacchiacca.
F. Zeri and B.B. Frederickson, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections, 1972, p. 222, as 'Florentine School, 16th Century'.
C. Volpe, 'Lotto a Roma e Raffaello', Lorenzo Lotto. Atti del Covegno Internazionale di Studi per il V centenario della nascita, ed. P. Zampetti and V. Sgarbi, Treviso, 1981, p. 145, as Lorenzo Lotto.
A.R. Murphy, European Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. An Illustrated Summary Catalogue, Boston, 1985, p. 142, illustrated.
M. Lucco, P. Humfrey, A. Nova, et al., Lorenzo Lotto a recanati. "Nel cor profondo un amoroso affeto", Venice, 1998, pp. 26-28, no. 5, illustrated, as Lorenzo Lotto.

Exhibited

Recanati, Villa Colloredo Mels, Lorenzo Lotto a recanati. "Nel cor profondo un amoroso affeto", 5 July - 4 October 1998, no. 5.

Lot Essay

When purchased by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1963 this picture was first recognised as by Lorenzo Lotto. However, the attribution was disputed first by Nikolenko (loc. cit., 1966) and later by Fredericksen and Zeri (loc. cit., 1972) who believed it to be by an unknown Florentine artist.

At the international conference (1980; loc. cit., 1981) celebrating the birth of the artist, Professor Carlo Volpe reattributed the picture to Lotto. This attribution was affirmed when the picture was included in the Lorenzo Lotto exhibition in Recanati (1998). In the catalogue entry, Mauro Lucco dates the picture to circa 1511, just after the artist's stay in Rome, during his sojourn in the March. He compares its style with the Deposition (Pinacoteca Civica, Iesi) and the Transfiguration (Pinacoteca Comunale, Recanati) both of that period. Furthermore, he notes that the size of the panel is identical to that of the Portrait of a Dominican monk (Upton House, Banbury, Oxfordshire) and the Portrait of a man (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), dated to early in the artist's career. However, Volpe dates the picture to circa 1515 when Lotto had returned to Bergamo, and argues that both in composition and style the artist refers to Raphael (loc. cit., 1981). In favour of this slightly later dating of the picture is the intense expression of the young man, looking over his shoulder with a slight strain of the neck and a thin beard that brings to mind the man opening the door in the signed and dated 1517 Susanna and the Elders in the Uffizi, Florence.

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