Bartolomeo Passarotti

Raffaello Borghini (1537–1588), Passarotti’s first biographer, praised him as one of the most talented draftsmen of his time¹ and enthusiastically singled out three of the painter’s best works on paper: an extra-large Head of Christ, its pendant of the Virgin Mary,² and an extravagant Head of a Gypsy Woman, which apparently the artist had offered as a gift to Don Giovanni de’ Medici. Passarotti’s proficiency as a draftsman was further celebrated by the erudite Ignazio Danti (1536–1586), who remembered that the artist “had become known as one of the most splendid luminaries that the art of drawing had ever known, for in the handling of his pen he surpassed not only the artists of his own age, but everyone who has come down to us in recent memory.”³ The majority of Passarotti’s drawings, including the Morgan’s Head of a Satyr, are indeed made in pen and brown ink applied on the paper through a precise layout of parallel and crossed strokes, a technique that he could have learned from Parmigianino, the artist who most deeply influenced Passarotti’s early style.

Depictions of fantastic, grotesque, or exotic heads like the Head of a Satyr are hallmarks of Passarotti’s drawn oeuvre and constitute a key component to understanding his eccentric personality. Drawings such as the celebrated Head of an African Woman⁴ or the Old Laughing Woman,⁵ Beast Man,⁶ or Heads of a Nymph and a Satyr⁷ serve as revealing examples of this genre. The Morgan’s Head of a Satyr testifies to the Bolognese artist’s fascination with grotesque representations, an artistic trend that dates back to the local figurative tradition of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance and which would be carried into the seventeenth century by artists like Annibale Carracci with his celebrated caricature drawings.

Rather than serving as preparatory studies for paintings, these drawings were mostly made as autonomous works, divertissements to be offered as extravagant gifts to colleagues, friends, or patrons. For this reason, they were often produced in series or multiples. A copy of the Morgan’s sheet, executed by a collaborator of Passarotti, is today in Edinburgh at the National Gallery of Scotland.⁸

Considering the present drawing’s affinities with Passarotti’s genre paintings, it is probable that the sheet was produced during the second half of the 1570s. Passarotti turned his attention at this time to the representation of coarse or bizarre human types and grotesque characters, protagonists of his celebrated genre paintings such as the Butcher’s Shop (ca. 1580), Fishmongers (ca. 1580), and Merry Company (ca. 1577).⁹ In the last of these, the man on the left holding a wine jug recalls—with his lumpy nose, his unnaturally protruding chin, and his shamelessly wide-open mouth—the distorted features that characterize the satyr. But in the satyr’s head, Passarotti accentuated the monstrous features of the creature in an inextricable and continuous combination of different components: the curly hair, the ruffled beard, and the grapes crowning the satyr’s head, for example, merge together, and the deep wrinkles of the forehead seem to fuse with the thick horns emerging from the hair.

While most of Passarotti’s grotesque heads are seen in three-quarters, the Morgan’s satyr is depicted in profile, like the illustrious men portrayed on antique or Renaissance medals. Works such as the late-fifteenth-century bronze plaquette portraying Attila as a satyr could have served as inspiration for Passarotti’s invention.¹⁰ The plaquette was recopied numerous times and its iconography circulated broadly during the sixteenth century. The profile of Attila as it appears on the plaquette was in fact used as a prototype for the portrait of the Hun sculpted at the Certosa di Pavia by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo and reproduced in an illustration of Paolo Giovio’s Elogia (1575). Compared to the profile of Attila in the bronze plaquette, however, the satyr of Passarotti’s drawing is animated by a powerful sense of motion, and details such as the creature’s tongue sticking out from his mouth are accentuated to confer a further sense of bestial brutality.

—MSB

Footnotes:

1. Borghini 1967, 1:566.
2. The Head of Christ is today at the Princeton University Art Museum (inv. 1999-1); its pendant depicting the Virgin Mary is in a private collection, New York. On the two drawings, see Ghirardi 1990, 216–17, and Princeton 2014, 105–6.
3. Danti 1682, 97.
4. Two sheets depicting a Head of an African Woman are at the Galleria Estense, Modena (inv. 802 and 803). See Guastalla 2011, 116–19, nos. 38–39.
5. Two sheets depicting an Old Laughing Woman are at the Galleria Estense, Modena (inv. 948 and 977). See Guastalla 2011, 62–63, no. 12. Other versions of this subject are at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid (inv. 310), at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 16397), and in a private collection, Zurich (see Ghirardi 1990, 71).
6. Graphische Sammlung, Stuttgart, inv. 6259.
7. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 4066s. See Ghirardi 1990, 72.
8. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, inv. d3117. See Andrews 1968, 1:90, no. d3117.
9. See Ghirardi 1990, nos. 59, 64, 65.
10. The plaquette is known in many examples; see Warren 2014, 3, no. 372.