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Lot Essay
We are grateful to John Marciari, who first identified the sitter and attributed this portrait to Jacopo Tintoretto, for sharing his as-yet unpublished essay on this painting and for granting us permission to reproduce it below. We are also thankful to Peter Humfrey (written communication, 10 April 2025, on the basis of photographs), Keith Christiansen (written communication, 8 April 2025, on the basis of photographs), and Mattia Vinco (written communication, 8 April 2025, on the basis of photographs) for endorsing the attribution.
The painting was included in the catalogue of the 5th Biennale dell'Antiquariato in Florence (Palazzo Strozzi, 22 September – 22 October 1967) as a Portrait of a Magistrate by Jacopo Tintoretto, citing Roberto Longhi (1964) and Luigi Coletti (1962) as having supported the attribution.
________
Jacopo Tintoretto is today among the most highly esteemed artists of the Italian Renaissance, but his fame rests largely on narrative paintings such as the Miracle of the Slave (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice), his altarpieces, his large murals and ceiling paintings in the Palazzo Ducale, and above all on the great decorative cycle at the Scuola di San Rocco. Yet, although his portraits have received less critical attention than almost any other aspect of his work, he was nonetheless the foremost portrait painter in Venice during the later cinquecento, and contemporaries such as Cristoforo Sorte and Gian Paolo Lomazzo praised Tintoretto’s perfettissimo giudicio nei ritratti (‘most perfect judgment in portaits’) and identified him as a ritrattista d’eterna fama (‘portraitist of eternal fame’).[i] He was responsible for fixing the images of doges, senators, and procurators—the aristocratic elite and ruling class of Venice—as well as leading intellectuals and artists. Despite the importance of their sitters, however, Tintoretto’s portraits demonstrate a remarkable restraint, often eschewing props and details of a setting. While the ceremonial garb of the patriciate was necessarily part of many pictures, rarely did Tintoretto obsess over the details of ermine or silk brocade, choosing to indicate these markers of status but to focus especially on the direct gaze and distinctive facial qualities of his sitters. Similarly, while Tintoretto’s painting in general is characterized by slashing brushwork that often separates forms into broad strokes of contrasting bright color, his portraits exhibit a more restricted palette and, at least in the faces, a delicate—if still painterly—network of strokes.
The present canvas, hitherto unpublished, demonstrates these essential qualities of a Tintoretto portrait. Tintoretto’s subject was Vincenzo Morosini (1511–1589), military commander, ambassador, Cavaliere of the Stola d’Oro, Procurator de Citra of San Marco, and patron of the arts.[ii] Typically, Tintoretto has concentrated his energies on the face of the sitter, capturing Morosini’s shrewd glaucous stare, his face unmoving but still full of expression; he is positioned at an angle, his body turning to the left, so that he fixes the viewer with a sideward gaze. As in other late portraits by the artist such as the Procurator of Saint Mark’s in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the paint is thickest in the flesh of the face, while the thin strokes that depict the man’s beard barely cover the ground layer of the canvas. Details of the costume are treated in a still more summary manner: Morosini’s stola d’oro is almost impressionistic, as are the folds of his rich red robes,[iii] though they are counterbalanced by the delicate flicks of white and black paint capturing the ermine lining of the heavy garment. The featureless background is thinnest of all, although as in the NGA Procurator and other late portraits, Tintoretto has reinforced the background around the head and shoulders of the sitter.
Morosini’s visage is a familiar one, for a version of this portrait has been in the collection of the National Gallery since 1924 and has often been published in previous studies of Tintoretto’s portraiture (fig. 1).[iv] The London canvas is cropped more tightly around the bust of the sitter and slightly smaller in scale, but the position of the sitter’s body, the fall of light, and the details of the face—hollowed cheeks, furrowed brow, and red-rimmed eyes—are the same. Yet, the present work is no mere copy of the London portrait. There is no attempt to replicate the London painting stroke-by-stoke, for example: consider how differently the stola d’oro is treated in each. There are also pentimenti in both works, most clearly visible around the shoulders of the larger canvas. One can easily imagine Tintoretto using the smaller London head study to produce the larger painting, for the interpretation of the beard or the wrinkled flesh of Morosini’s face is slightly different from that in the London canvas, but it is still entirely Tintoretto’s own.
The two Morosini portraits would thus be a parallel case to several other instances in Tintoretto’s work in which both a small head sketch and a larger, more elaborate portrait—both by the master himself—survive. The relationship of such pairs was the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings exhibition in 2018-19, in which the Metropolitan’s own Portrait of a Man, for example, was juxtaposed with the related head study from the British Royal Collection. The exhibition helped affirm that in many cases both versions of a portrait were by Tintoretto himself. It seems likely that the small portraits were painted from life but kept in the studio, where they could be used to create additional portraits of the important men whose faces they capture. Other works that exist in similar relationships are the circa 1570 portraits of Jacopo Sansovino in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar and the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, and the circa 1576 portraits of Marco Grimani at the Museo del Prado and the Kunsthistorisches Museum.[v]
In the case of Morosini, for example, the same head study seems clearly to have served also as the model for portraits of the procurator in the Resurrection altarpiece of his chapel in San Giorgio Maggiore (a work executed largely by Domenico Tintoretto around 1587-88), and for his appearance in Palma Giovane’s painting at the Ospedaletto dei Crociferi of Doge Pasquale Cicogna and Other Dignataries Visiting the Oratory, as well as Palma’s Pope Alexander III and Doge Sebastiani Ziani send the Young Otto to Frederick Barbarossa of circa 1583 in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio at the Palazzo Ducale, among other works.[vi] Obviously, not all of these were by Tintoretto himself, and a further painting formerly at the Palazzo Ducale and now in the Galleria Franchetti at the Ca’ d’Oro (fig. 2)—three-quarter length like the present painting, but clearly based on the London sketch with its landscape view (albeit in reverse)—is also clearly a workshop production, stiff in execution and lower in quality, nothing at all like the grand portrait presented here. The Ca d’Oro version does, however, bear the date 1580, giving a terminus ante quem for the London sketch and also, in all likelihood, for the present work. It is plausible to suggest that they might date to around 1579-80, after Morosini became a procurator, and also when he was active as one of the supervisors for the reconstruction of the Palazzo Ducale after the great fire in late 1577. As Francesco Mozzetti and Giovanna Sarti have proposed, Morosini’s role in the latter project likely also explains his appearance in a number of the grand paintings executed by Tintoretto and Palma for the redecoration of the palace. The Ca’ d’Oro canvas was presumably made as part of a series of portraits for a ceremonial setting, with the inscription and the change of orientation to make it consistent with others in that set.[vii]
We might also thus compare the three portraits of Morosini to those that Tintoretto made of Doge Pietro Loredan around 1567-70. It has been suggested that the version in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne was a modello kept in the studio, and the version now at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth—also by Tintoretto himself, with changes and pentimenti—was intended for the sitter or his family, while a third version was placed in the Palazzo Ducale, where it was destroyed in the 1577 fire.[viii] Might the present version of Vincenzo Morosini’s portrait be a parallel case, a painting made for the sitter himself, while the Ca’ d’Oro version was for an official setting in the dark palace?
Whatever the circumstances for the creation of the portraits, Morosini must have been pleased with them, for his association with Tintoretto would continue. In addition to his likely role in commissioning Tintoretto’s paintings in the Palazzo Ducale, and the abovementioned altarpiece at San Giorgio Maggiore, Carlo Ridolfi noted that Morosini also owned a Madonna and Child with many Saints in a circle, a Figure of Vulcan, and a San Lorenzo on the Grill that had been made for the altar of the Bonomi family in San Francesco della Vigna, but which Morosini acquired after it was rejected by the original patron.[ix]
The Portrait of Vincenzo Morosini is thus an exciting addition to Tintoretto’s known work, a strong yet subtle image of one of Tintoretto’s great patrons, who was also a major figure in the world of Venetian politics and culture in the 1570s and 80s. As Mozzettti and Sarti noted in their discussion of Morosini, ‘his is a proud and melancholy face, which touches a chord in the heart and imprints itself in the memory of the observer’.
John Marciari
Endnotes:
[i] The quotations from Sorti’s Osservationi nella pittura of 1580 and Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura of 1584 are both cited in M. Falomir, ‘Tintoretto’s Portraiture’, Tintoretto, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2007, pp. 95-114; this essay remains the best concise introduction to Tintoretto’s work as a portraitist. See also P. Rossi, Tintoretto: I ritratti, Milan, 1990; Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1994; W.R. Rearick, ‘Reflections on Tintoretto as a Portraitist', Artibus et Historiae, XVI, 1995, pp. 51-68; F. Del Torre Scheuch, ‘Volti Veneziani: I ritratti di Jacopo Tintoretto', Tintoretto, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2012, pp. 157-63 ; and R. Echols and F. Ilchman, ‘Portraitist’, Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 2018, pp. 145-69.
[ii] On Morosini, see F. Mozzetti and G. Sarti, ‘Biografia, immagine e memoria: storia di Vincenzo Morosini’, Venezia Cinquecento: studi di storia dell'arte e della cultura, VII, no. 13, 1997, pp. 141-58.
[iii] A red lake glaze that would originally have toned back the white highlights, integrating them with the red body of the robe, but as in many of Tintoretto’s portraits, this delicate glaze survives only in part.
[iv] On the National Gallery canvas, see N. Penny, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings: II: Venice 1540-1600, London and New Haven, 2007, pp. 176-85.
[v] For discussion of the Sansovino portraits, see M. Falomir, op. cit., 2007, cat. 35; for the Grimani portraits, see Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti, 1994, nos. 37-38, and M. Falomir, op. cit., 2007, pp. 105-7.
[vi] See F. Mozzetti and G. Sarti, op. cit., 1997, and N. Penny, op. cit., 2007, pp. 183-84. On the close relationship of Palma and Tintoretto at the time, see, for example, J. Marciari, Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice, New York, 2018, pp. 190-95.
[vii] A damaged portrait of Marco Grimani by Tintoretto’s workshop, now in the deposits of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, as well as a portrait of Alessandro Bon at the Ca d’Oro, also by Tintoretto’s workshop, are similar to the Ca d’Oro Morosini, with coats of arms and inscription. The Accademia painting is said to have come from the Procuratoria de Citra; one wonders whether all these lesser-quality portraits may have formerly hung together there.
[viii] M. Falomir, op. cit., 2007, p. 105.
[ix] C. Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’Arte, Venice, 1648, p. 44.
The painting was included in the catalogue of the 5th Biennale dell'Antiquariato in Florence (Palazzo Strozzi, 22 September – 22 October 1967) as a Portrait of a Magistrate by Jacopo Tintoretto, citing Roberto Longhi (1964) and Luigi Coletti (1962) as having supported the attribution.
________
Jacopo Tintoretto is today among the most highly esteemed artists of the Italian Renaissance, but his fame rests largely on narrative paintings such as the Miracle of the Slave (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice), his altarpieces, his large murals and ceiling paintings in the Palazzo Ducale, and above all on the great decorative cycle at the Scuola di San Rocco. Yet, although his portraits have received less critical attention than almost any other aspect of his work, he was nonetheless the foremost portrait painter in Venice during the later cinquecento, and contemporaries such as Cristoforo Sorte and Gian Paolo Lomazzo praised Tintoretto’s perfettissimo giudicio nei ritratti (‘most perfect judgment in portaits’) and identified him as a ritrattista d’eterna fama (‘portraitist of eternal fame’).[i] He was responsible for fixing the images of doges, senators, and procurators—the aristocratic elite and ruling class of Venice—as well as leading intellectuals and artists. Despite the importance of their sitters, however, Tintoretto’s portraits demonstrate a remarkable restraint, often eschewing props and details of a setting. While the ceremonial garb of the patriciate was necessarily part of many pictures, rarely did Tintoretto obsess over the details of ermine or silk brocade, choosing to indicate these markers of status but to focus especially on the direct gaze and distinctive facial qualities of his sitters. Similarly, while Tintoretto’s painting in general is characterized by slashing brushwork that often separates forms into broad strokes of contrasting bright color, his portraits exhibit a more restricted palette and, at least in the faces, a delicate—if still painterly—network of strokes.
The present canvas, hitherto unpublished, demonstrates these essential qualities of a Tintoretto portrait. Tintoretto’s subject was Vincenzo Morosini (1511–1589), military commander, ambassador, Cavaliere of the Stola d’Oro, Procurator de Citra of San Marco, and patron of the arts.[ii] Typically, Tintoretto has concentrated his energies on the face of the sitter, capturing Morosini’s shrewd glaucous stare, his face unmoving but still full of expression; he is positioned at an angle, his body turning to the left, so that he fixes the viewer with a sideward gaze. As in other late portraits by the artist such as the Procurator of Saint Mark’s in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the paint is thickest in the flesh of the face, while the thin strokes that depict the man’s beard barely cover the ground layer of the canvas. Details of the costume are treated in a still more summary manner: Morosini’s stola d’oro is almost impressionistic, as are the folds of his rich red robes,[iii] though they are counterbalanced by the delicate flicks of white and black paint capturing the ermine lining of the heavy garment. The featureless background is thinnest of all, although as in the NGA Procurator and other late portraits, Tintoretto has reinforced the background around the head and shoulders of the sitter.
Morosini’s visage is a familiar one, for a version of this portrait has been in the collection of the National Gallery since 1924 and has often been published in previous studies of Tintoretto’s portraiture (fig. 1).[iv] The London canvas is cropped more tightly around the bust of the sitter and slightly smaller in scale, but the position of the sitter’s body, the fall of light, and the details of the face—hollowed cheeks, furrowed brow, and red-rimmed eyes—are the same. Yet, the present work is no mere copy of the London portrait. There is no attempt to replicate the London painting stroke-by-stoke, for example: consider how differently the stola d’oro is treated in each. There are also pentimenti in both works, most clearly visible around the shoulders of the larger canvas. One can easily imagine Tintoretto using the smaller London head study to produce the larger painting, for the interpretation of the beard or the wrinkled flesh of Morosini’s face is slightly different from that in the London canvas, but it is still entirely Tintoretto’s own.
The two Morosini portraits would thus be a parallel case to several other instances in Tintoretto’s work in which both a small head sketch and a larger, more elaborate portrait—both by the master himself—survive. The relationship of such pairs was the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings exhibition in 2018-19, in which the Metropolitan’s own Portrait of a Man, for example, was juxtaposed with the related head study from the British Royal Collection. The exhibition helped affirm that in many cases both versions of a portrait were by Tintoretto himself. It seems likely that the small portraits were painted from life but kept in the studio, where they could be used to create additional portraits of the important men whose faces they capture. Other works that exist in similar relationships are the circa 1570 portraits of Jacopo Sansovino in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar and the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, and the circa 1576 portraits of Marco Grimani at the Museo del Prado and the Kunsthistorisches Museum.[v]
In the case of Morosini, for example, the same head study seems clearly to have served also as the model for portraits of the procurator in the Resurrection altarpiece of his chapel in San Giorgio Maggiore (a work executed largely by Domenico Tintoretto around 1587-88), and for his appearance in Palma Giovane’s painting at the Ospedaletto dei Crociferi of Doge Pasquale Cicogna and Other Dignataries Visiting the Oratory, as well as Palma’s Pope Alexander III and Doge Sebastiani Ziani send the Young Otto to Frederick Barbarossa of circa 1583 in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio at the Palazzo Ducale, among other works.[vi] Obviously, not all of these were by Tintoretto himself, and a further painting formerly at the Palazzo Ducale and now in the Galleria Franchetti at the Ca’ d’Oro (fig. 2)—three-quarter length like the present painting, but clearly based on the London sketch with its landscape view (albeit in reverse)—is also clearly a workshop production, stiff in execution and lower in quality, nothing at all like the grand portrait presented here. The Ca d’Oro version does, however, bear the date 1580, giving a terminus ante quem for the London sketch and also, in all likelihood, for the present work. It is plausible to suggest that they might date to around 1579-80, after Morosini became a procurator, and also when he was active as one of the supervisors for the reconstruction of the Palazzo Ducale after the great fire in late 1577. As Francesco Mozzetti and Giovanna Sarti have proposed, Morosini’s role in the latter project likely also explains his appearance in a number of the grand paintings executed by Tintoretto and Palma for the redecoration of the palace. The Ca’ d’Oro canvas was presumably made as part of a series of portraits for a ceremonial setting, with the inscription and the change of orientation to make it consistent with others in that set.[vii]
We might also thus compare the three portraits of Morosini to those that Tintoretto made of Doge Pietro Loredan around 1567-70. It has been suggested that the version in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne was a modello kept in the studio, and the version now at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth—also by Tintoretto himself, with changes and pentimenti—was intended for the sitter or his family, while a third version was placed in the Palazzo Ducale, where it was destroyed in the 1577 fire.[viii] Might the present version of Vincenzo Morosini’s portrait be a parallel case, a painting made for the sitter himself, while the Ca’ d’Oro version was for an official setting in the dark palace?
Whatever the circumstances for the creation of the portraits, Morosini must have been pleased with them, for his association with Tintoretto would continue. In addition to his likely role in commissioning Tintoretto’s paintings in the Palazzo Ducale, and the abovementioned altarpiece at San Giorgio Maggiore, Carlo Ridolfi noted that Morosini also owned a Madonna and Child with many Saints in a circle, a Figure of Vulcan, and a San Lorenzo on the Grill that had been made for the altar of the Bonomi family in San Francesco della Vigna, but which Morosini acquired after it was rejected by the original patron.[ix]
The Portrait of Vincenzo Morosini is thus an exciting addition to Tintoretto’s known work, a strong yet subtle image of one of Tintoretto’s great patrons, who was also a major figure in the world of Venetian politics and culture in the 1570s and 80s. As Mozzettti and Sarti noted in their discussion of Morosini, ‘his is a proud and melancholy face, which touches a chord in the heart and imprints itself in the memory of the observer’.
John Marciari
Endnotes:
[i] The quotations from Sorti’s Osservationi nella pittura of 1580 and Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura of 1584 are both cited in M. Falomir, ‘Tintoretto’s Portraiture’, Tintoretto, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2007, pp. 95-114; this essay remains the best concise introduction to Tintoretto’s work as a portraitist. See also P. Rossi, Tintoretto: I ritratti, Milan, 1990; Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1994; W.R. Rearick, ‘Reflections on Tintoretto as a Portraitist', Artibus et Historiae, XVI, 1995, pp. 51-68; F. Del Torre Scheuch, ‘Volti Veneziani: I ritratti di Jacopo Tintoretto', Tintoretto, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2012, pp. 157-63 ; and R. Echols and F. Ilchman, ‘Portraitist’, Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 2018, pp. 145-69.
[ii] On Morosini, see F. Mozzetti and G. Sarti, ‘Biografia, immagine e memoria: storia di Vincenzo Morosini’, Venezia Cinquecento: studi di storia dell'arte e della cultura, VII, no. 13, 1997, pp. 141-58.
[iii] A red lake glaze that would originally have toned back the white highlights, integrating them with the red body of the robe, but as in many of Tintoretto’s portraits, this delicate glaze survives only in part.
[iv] On the National Gallery canvas, see N. Penny, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings: II: Venice 1540-1600, London and New Haven, 2007, pp. 176-85.
[v] For discussion of the Sansovino portraits, see M. Falomir, op. cit., 2007, cat. 35; for the Grimani portraits, see Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti, 1994, nos. 37-38, and M. Falomir, op. cit., 2007, pp. 105-7.
[vi] See F. Mozzetti and G. Sarti, op. cit., 1997, and N. Penny, op. cit., 2007, pp. 183-84. On the close relationship of Palma and Tintoretto at the time, see, for example, J. Marciari, Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice, New York, 2018, pp. 190-95.
[vii] A damaged portrait of Marco Grimani by Tintoretto’s workshop, now in the deposits of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, as well as a portrait of Alessandro Bon at the Ca d’Oro, also by Tintoretto’s workshop, are similar to the Ca d’Oro Morosini, with coats of arms and inscription. The Accademia painting is said to have come from the Procuratoria de Citra; one wonders whether all these lesser-quality portraits may have formerly hung together there.
[viii] M. Falomir, op. cit., 2007, p. 105.
[ix] C. Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’Arte, Venice, 1648, p. 44.