Paris Bordone

A prominent painter in Venice during the time of Titian, Paris Bordone’s oeuvre as a draftsman remains ill defined, especially in relation to that of the great master. Fewer than three dozen drawings are traditionally attributed to Bordone and, of these, only a handful are related to paintings. The artist worked almost exclusively in black chalk or charcoal combined with white chalk on blue paper. Although once given to Tintoretto and then Jacopo Bassano, the present study was convincingly attributed to Bordone by Tietze and Tietze-Conrat in 1944, an attribution that has been almost unanimously accepted since.¹ A comparison with Bordone’s Seated Youth in the Ashmolean Museum, which is a preparatory study for a young man in the foreground of the grand Fishermen Delivering the Ring to the Doge, commissioned in 1534 for the Sala dell’Albergo of the Scuola di San Marco and now in the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, underscores the drawing’s authorship (Fig. 1).² Standing Man Playing a Viola da Gamba remains one of the rare drawn masterpieces by Bordone.

The drawing lies at the heart of Bordone’s close yet possibly strained relationship with Titian. Giorgio Vasari, who met Bordone in 1566 and is the primary source for the artist’s early years, relates that Bordone was born in Treviso but moved to Venice at the age of eight with his widowed mother.³ The child learned grammar and became an excellent musician before training for a brief period with Titian and learning how to emulate his master’s style extraordinarily well. At the age of eighteen, Bordone received his first independent commission, which was for an altarpiece in San Niccolò ai Frari.⁴ Apparently Titian appropriated this commission, as the older master executed the altarpiece, which now is in the collection of the Pinacoteca Vaticana.

As has long been recognized, the Morgan drawing is a reprise of the central section of a pen and ink drawing usually attributed to Titian and now in the British Museum (Fig. 2).⁵ Titian himself was an accomplished player of the viola da gamba, an instrument similar to the modern cello that was played with a bow. Instead of stroking the strings, however, Titian’s musician uses the bow to point suggestively at the area circumscribed by the legs of his female companion and directs his gaze at her. Bordone adjusted this motif by moving the musician’s hand slightly back. Both drawings are firmly anchored in the Venetian pastoral tradition embodied by Giorgione. In particular, the nude female flautist in the London drawing relates to the famous Louvre Pastoral Concert (ca. 1509), variously given to Giorgione and Titian.

Both drawings are difficult to date, yet it seems unlikely that Bordone would have been able to create such a technically and spatially ambitious drawing while still an apprentice in Titian’s workshop. Furthermore, Titian’s drawing, or at least the left-hand figure, is unlikely to predate the mid-1520s. As far as can be ascertained, Bordone never used the figure of the viola da gamba player in his paintings. The insistent energy with which the dense chalk is applied, the strong silhouetting, and the exaggerated musculature of the figure approximate Titian’s studies of the 1520s and appear most similarly in Bordone’s Ashmolean Seated Youth.

—REP

Footnotes:

1. Konrad Oberhuber, in Paris 1993, under no. 94, suggests the drawing may be by Titian, although Roger Rearick in the same catalogue affirms the Bordone attribution (no. 142).
2. For the painting, see Canova 1964, 18–19.
3. Vasari 1996, 2:798–99, for most of the biographical information, including: “ . . . having learned his grammar and become an excellent musician, he went to be with Tiziano, but he did not spend many years with him.” Vasari 1878– 85, 7:461.
4. Furthermore Bordone was described as “pictor” in a document of 21 June 1518; Fossaluzza 1984, 123, doc. 2.
5. The attribution to Titian is supported by an etching, in reverse of the drawing, by Valentin Lefebre published in 1682 and bearing the lettering Titianus in[venit] p[inxit]. The suggestion that the print was made after a lost painting has been successfully discredited, especially since the etching follows the drawing with great precision. The drawing’s two different ink colors suggest it was made at two different moments in time; according to Rearick, the right half may date to around 1511–12 and the left half to around 1520 (in Paris 1993, 480).