Francesco Salviati

Best known for his expansive fresco decorations, including the Sala dell’Udienza in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (1543–45), and the Palazzo Farnese, Rome (begun ca. 1552), Salviati also painted altarpieces, portraits, and smaller-scale cabinet paintings. He was a consummate and prolific draftsman, producing exceptionally spirited studies in pen and ink and refined designs in red chalk. More unusual is his work in black chalk, of which this impressive, carefully rendered patriarchal head is a magnificent example. Depicted slightly from below, the face is marked by a stern expression and furrowed brow. The semicircular sweep of drapery around the shoulders and the high degree of descriptive detail are reminiscent of antique Roman portrait busts, which the artist could have encountered in Rome and Florence.

The specificity of the facial features, such as the forked beard, the repeated folds of flesh around the eyes, and the mole near the nose, have tempted collectors and scholars alike to identify the drawing as a portrait of one of the artist’s contemporaries. In a note taken from the old mount, the former owner Jonathan Richardson observed that according to an inscription formerly pasted to the drawing, it represents Baccio Bandinelli, Salviati’s master from around 1524 to 1526 and a fellow artist employed at the Medici court (see I, 6c). Known likenesses of Bandinelli, such as his self-portrait in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, represent him with a forked beard, but the resemblance is not entirely convincing.¹ A plausible and intriguing suggestion made by Wendy Thompson in 2008 is that the sitter could be the Florentine author Giovanni Battista Gelli (1498–1563), who is known to have been drawn by Salviati at least once, and, in another instance, is depicted with a mole on his right cheek.² Again, however, comparisons with known images of Gelli remain inconclusive. Instead, the present drawing likely was created as an ideal head or character study to be used as the need arose rather than as a contemporary portrait.

The almost northern European realism of the image resulted in previous erroneous attributions to Maarten van Heemskerck³ and Melchior Lorck.⁴ Nevertheless, the sheet’s blend of Michelangelesque grandeur with the decorative tendencies of Mannerism—apparent in such details as the ornamental curls and free strands of hair—is entirely characteristic of Salviati’s work and indeed recurs almost identically in several of the artist’s paintings and frescoes. Most striking perhaps is the resemblance to an Apostle directly behind Christ in the 1547 Incredulity of St. Thomas in the Musée du Louvre⁵ as well as to the soldier holding the papal banner at far right of the fresco Ranuccio Farnese Receiving the Baton of the Church in the Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani, Palazzo Farnese, Rome.⁶ In both, the correspondence is almost exact and includes the shape and angle of the turned head, the sideways direction of the piercing gaze, and the small mole beneath the right eye. Other closely related heads appear in St. John the Almoner in Santa Maria dell’Anima (ca. 1550); the Wedding Feast at Cana in San Salvatore in Lauro (ca. 1551–52); and the Death of Absalom in Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, Rome (ca. 1553–54).⁷ Presumably the drawing was executed ca. 1547, when the head first appears in a painting.

—REP

Footnotes:

1. The Gardner self-portrait is dated to ca. 1545; for the most recent discussion, see Boston 2014, no. 28.
2. E-mail, 2008, referring to an engraving by Enea Vico of Gelli showing him with a mole on his right cheek; see Thompson 2007, 228. See also a 1546 woodcut after a lost design by Salviati (Thompson 2007, 228). Both prints show the sitter in three-quarter profile turned to the right, rather than almost frontally as in the Morgan study.
3. Mentioned in Jonathan Richardson’s inscription.
4. Benesch 1952, passim.
5. Rome and Paris 1998, no. 36.
6. Strinati and Walter 1995, figs. 1 and 13.
7. Mortari 1984, 396; Rome and Paris 1998, no. 20