We see the figure of an elegant young man, portrayed in a meditative pose emphasised by several features, such as the violet held gracefully in one hand, ribbon showing at the neck of his shirt and eyes gazing into the distance, which could allude to a faraway love. An old inscription on the back of the panel indicates that the man portrayed is Giovanni Battista Vannucci (or Vannini, or a similar surname), a Brescian aristocrat.[1]

In a catalogue of 1858 the painting was attributed to Giorgione, along with another evocative portrait of a gentleman believed to be Cesare Borgia,[2] which is similar in size, layout and painting style.[3] True, the details in both paintings indicate a distant Venetian origin, particularly in a degree of fine observation with a faintly northern flavour, such as we might find for example in the work of Bartolomeo Veneto—to whom this portrait was later attributed.[4] But the two portraits fit more comfortably into the dynamic and in some ways unconventional context where the best new developments in Northern Italy were happening at this time: the area of Lombardy around Brescia and Cremona. So the presumed portrait of Cesare Borgia was later convincingly credited to the Cremonese artist Altobello Melone; while the painting of our gentleman (after various hypotheses) was given an initial credible attribution to another Cremonese painter, Gian Francesco Bembo.[5]

The crucial moment in this figurative phase comes with the great fresco cycle in the nave of the Cathedral in Cremona, on which Bembo worked in 1515. In his Presentation in the Temple we note two gentlemen who are clearly very similar to the one depicted here. In other respects however, the portrait recalls the work of the young Melone, especially in the lengthening oval of the face ending in a prominent chin, and an expression so intense that it almost appears surly. In the end, the best solution to the attribution problem seems to be Francesco Prata,[6] an artist from Caravaggio who moved around in this border area of the Lombardy lowlands, taking inspiration explicitly from the Brescian artist Gerolamo Romanino,[7] and also from Melone. The portrait would belong to a youthful phase of Prata’s work, around 1515 or not much later, so we can imagine him at twenty-five or so, basically the same age as Romanino and Melone. The great altarpiece with the Marriage of the Virgin in the church of San Francesco in Brescia, one of his most important works, would be from some years later, close to the time of his other significant undertaking, the frescoes decorating the dome of the Holy Sacrament Chapel in the church of Saints Fermo and Rustico, Caravaggio. After this Prata disappears from the scene, perhaps because he died when still fairly young, while Melone and Romanino, who had worked in their turn on the frescoes in the Cathedral in Cremona after Bembo, would take this type of painting towards an increasingly emphatic realism, remarkable for its freedom and use of irony.[8]

Giovanni Valagussa

[1] ‘Ego Jo¯es Bap¯ta Vannu…/Nob. Brixiensis/ Nunc… …E… .../ manibus’. A change of ownership is noted but the owner’s name has been erased.

[2] See cat. 56;  Altobello Melone, Portrait of a gentleman (Cesare Borgia?) c.1513

[3] In the early 1800s both paintings were in the collection of Guglielmo Lochis, in his villa at Crocette di Mozzo.

[4] Bartolomeo Veneto (worked 1502–1531)

[5] Bembo (worked c.1480–1543); Mina Gregori, ‘Altobello e G. Francesco Bembo’, Paragone Arte, vol. 8, no. 93, 1957, pp. 16–40

[6] Marco Tanzi, ‘Francesco Prata da Caravaggio aggiunte e verifiche’, Bolletino d’arte, series 6, vol. 72, nos 44/45, 1987, pp. 141–56

[7] Gerolamo Romanino (1484/1487–1560?)

[8] When this portrait was restored by Minerva Maggi (thanks to the Bergamo Soroptimist Club, celebrating the 40th anniversary of its foundation) it was also decided to restore a strip to the lower part of the work—which can be seen in an old photograph from around 1912—probably removed in the early 1930s during a previous restoration. This area, extending the painting downwards, in fact seems to restore its more correct proportions, consistent above all with what is probably its oldest (though not original) frame.