Portrait Of A Young Patrician – Attr. To Scipione Pulzone (1544-1598)

Oil on canvas, central Italy last quarter of the 16th century.
From a three-quarter view, a lovely young girl with an expressive look observes us. The quality of her toilet is striking: fine lace marks the shoulders and highlights a silhouette wrapped in a pink dress with red patterns whose high collar ends in a gadrooned ruff. A heavy two-strand gold and coral necklace harmoniously completes an outfit which, by its high degree of refinement, indicates high social rank. This face with its youthful features is that of adolescence; the young lady is not yet a woman. Revealing the beauty of his model to possible suitors for an engagement would therefore be the intention of this portrait? In this light, could the glowing chromaticism of her outfit be a promise of love to which her headdress of white flowers, a symbol of purity, would respond. We are in the presence of a portrait from the end of the 16th century whose manner is borrowed from Anthonis Mor, portrait painter of the Spanish court whose style had repercussions throughout Europe. One of his most fruitful Italian followers was Scipione Pulzone, to whom we can attribute our painting. If the aesthetic canons of his time required him to represent his model in a somewhat fixed pose, he nevertheless managed to breathe life into her by giving her a look that seems to follow the viewer wherever they are. This virtuosity, which his friend the painter Giovanni Baglione described as “naturalist”, earned him certain success with the great Italian families. Among his portraits of young patricians, those of Vittoria Accoramboni (Castello di Bracciano), Marie de Medici as a child (Poggio Imperiale in Florence) and Clelia Farnese (Uffizi Museum in Florence) each present convincing stylistic similarities with our composition.

We have chosen to present the work to you in an Emilian gold-cassette frame decorated with scrolling foliage in bullinato.
Dimensions: 60 x 45.5 cm – 72 x 56 cm with the frame

Biography: Scipione Pulzone (Gaeta, 1544 – Rome, Feb. 1, 1598) learned painting from the Roman Jacopino del Conte, before being admitted to the Academy of Saint Luke in 1567. Having been able to observe the portraits made by Raphael and Anthonis Mor in Rome, it was quite natural that he took inspiration from them while increasing his own style with a shimmering color reminiscent of Venetian painting. In 1572, he was invited to Naples by Don Juan of Austria to paint his portrait, which increased his aura as a court painter and allowed him to obtain new prestigious commissions. Long praised for his portraits, art historians are now rediscovering this artist in the light of his religious works. Indeed, he was one of the first to move away from the ending mannerism of his contemporaries in favor of a clearer, less esoteric art, as prescribed by the directives of the Council of Trent.

Bibliography:
- ACCONCI, Alessandra (dir.), Scipione Pulzone: da Gaeta a Roma alle Corti europee, (cat. exp. Mostra, Gaeta, Museo diocesano, 27 giugno-27 October 2013), Rome, Palombi & Partner, 2013.
- CRANSTON , Jodi, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- DE LOGU, Giuseppe, Il ritratto nella pittura italiana, Bergamo, Istituto italiano d'arti grafiche, 1975.
- DERN, Alexandra, Scipione Pulzone (ca . 1546-1598), Weimar, Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2003.