The following article, admittedly unlikely to be of general interest, attempts to analyse two pictures which I have not seen 'in the flesh'; even so, I have seen many works by both of the principal painters referred to, and especially those of Pontormo. This is important because the present article attempts to compare a supposed Pontormo portrait with his critically attested works. Further, for copyright reasons, I have been unable to reproduce many of the images referred to and so I'm afraid the reader, should he or she so wish, will have to search them out online.
This article was prompted by my recent reading of the excellent catalogue for the exhibition entitled Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from Drawing to Painting, held in various places in the US in 2018-19 (an exhibition which unfortunately I didn't see). The catalogue is beautifully illustrated with some exceptional close-ups of Pontormo's paintings, including 'before' and 'after' photographs of the main picture in the exhibition, the Carmignano Visitation, that is, before and after its restoration; such photographs demonstrate very clearly the difference between what time and life had done with an artist's intentions (the finished art work) and, after cleaning, what those intentions had originally been - at least, so far as we can tell.
My curiosity was piqued in any case by a close-up of a painting called Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap (c. 1530), possibly a lost portrait of one Carlo Neroni1 according to the catalogue discussion. At this point I would reiterate that, although I have seen in person many of Pontormo's pictures, and especially those in the great exhibition held at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 2014: Pontormo e Rosso Fiorentino, Divergenti Vie della "Maniera" (not to mention his frescos at Galluzzo and his sublime Cappella Capponi paintings), I have not seen the Young Man in a Red Cap (c.1530), nor have I seen the one with which it is compared, the so-called Portrait of a Halberdier (c.1529-30). That said however, as previously stated in these articles, I look at pictures with the eye of a painter and, from that point of view, the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, as reproduced in the catalogue, is problematical as a supposed work of Pontormo.
Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, attributed to Pontormo, c1530, oil on wood
Private Collection, UK
(Image: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons)
The Halberdier (L'Alabardiere), by Pontormo, c1530, oil on canvas transferred from wood.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, L.A.
(Image: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons)
What alerted me to this was in fact the brilliant close-up photographs of both the Young Man in a Red Cap and the Halberdier. In another image (Fig. 9.1 in the catalogue) the once-lost painting (Young Man in a Red Cap) is shown in an engraving of circa 1759 in which the portrait is given to "Alessandro Allori, ...", (1535-1607), student of his adoptive 'uncle' who is known to art history more generally as Bronzino (born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Torri, 1503-72) - a student and then intimate friend of Pontormo. Subsequently, according to this catalogue, the now rediscovered painting (in 2008) was ascribed by various historians (but not all) to Pontormo. With the aid of the aforementioned close-ups, it is possible to easily compare the heads and other features of both the (painted) Young Man in a Red Cap and the Halberdier.
From a painter's viewpoint, there is an immediate and obvious problem in that the painting technique, the way the paint has been applied, is quite different in both pictures. The Portrait of a Halberdier is painted, as is usual in Pontormo, with relatively vigorous and free brush-strokes, the paint (here) comparatively thickly applied, and most importantly, the brush-strokes model, so to speak, in the manner of a sculptor, the plastic forms of the facial structure (and that of the hands), the brush being dragged along and around the features. Other examples of the same characteristic handling of paint (by Pontormo) can be seen in close-ups on various pages of the catalogue: for example, profile and full-face views of the women in the Visitation. The painter of the Young Man in a Red Cap on the other hand, has used a technique more appropriate to both traditional tempera and fresco painting; the artist has used a pointed brush to model with innumerable fine lines the chiaroscuro of the face and hands, much in the way that many contemporary artists made drawings: denser and more numerous in the shadow areas, sparser and less numerous in the lighter ones, giving way to open space where the light is strongest. Here, the brush is nowhere dragged along the forms but rather, applies those fine lines, almost independently of the specific forms, aiming instead to render volume wherever it may occur. It should also be noticed that in the face of the Halberdier, there is a variety of colours - pinks, creams, browns, etc. - whereas, the face of the Young Man in a Red Cap is nearly monochrome, using a very narrow range of browns progressively mixed with white (occasionally pinkish, as in the lower lip). To return nevertheless to the handling of the paint, again in the Halberdier it is relatively thick, being dragged along the forms of the cream jerkin he is wearing, following the billowing and receding of the folds and crevices of the material as they convey the physique and stance of the young man holding his halberd. Pontormo's rendering of the incidental folds, their shadows and highlights, suggests that he had observed these things in that particular case, that he had copied what he saw on his model; this point is important as, prior to and during the Renaissance, artists very commonly had their personal drawn repertoire of garment studies which they tended to reuse time and again (in altarpieces for example). In portraits this was normally not the case as each sitter (and his or her clothes) was unique; this suggests that the rendering of the Halberdier's clothing is particular to this portrait.
The handling of the elegant black vest and the metallic-grey sleeves in the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap is clearly different from Pontormo's manner. Here, the sleeves especially are treated much more generically and with the incidental accidents of shape and light homogenised somewhat, giving overall a less-specific effect. It can also be seen in the catalogue that the artist favours a smooth, almost-polished surface treatment which would seem to conform more to Bronzino's (later) manner, than to Pontormo's; to encapsulate the differences between the two artists' finished results, we might say, using a sculptural analogy, that whereas Pontormo's works are like cast bronze, Bronzino's are like polished ivory.
A small detail, that of the fine cord at the collars in both portraits, also calls attention to a divergent approach: in the Halberdier, the little cord - a mere two strokes of the brush - is just that, a fine line drawn quickly with the brush; that of the Young Man in a Red Cap is actually modelled in fictive three dimensions, complete with a dark shadow along one side. The technique, and the focus, in each case is different and points to - without confirming - a different author, in keeping that is with the other elements in each picture. I must admit just the same, that the small red laces attaching various parts of the Halberdier's red trousers are also painted in much more detail than is his collar cord.
A far more significant 'tell-tale' sign would seem to be the 'hard-edge' treatment of certain details in the Young Man in a Red Cap, especially along the external contours of his black jerkin and his hands: this manner of clear, precise delineation of the edges contrasts, obviously I would say - and keeping in mind that these two paintings are believed to be coeval - with the manner of the handling of those same details in the Halberdier. Pontormo treats all his edges as somewhat 'smudged' so to say, that is, he has softened the external contours of his forms; in relation to the hands in particular, the handling (!) is again quite different in both cases.
The Halberdier's hands are modelled by first 'drawing', with a brush, the main outlines and basic forms in a thin, reddish base colour; upon this is applied some thicker paint in some areas, and in others, translucent paint (glazes); these three basic techniques or treatments model the forms, often blending one technique with another, or as in the shadows, sometimes leaving the underpainting untouched, so as to arrive at the final effect. The Halberdier's right hand, the one holding the halberd, is a clear and classic example of this technique. The Young Man in a Red Cap's hands (on the other hand!) are possibly begun in a similar way but the subsequent application of paint is very different. Onto a thin, basic skin colour (it seems) is applied a network of very small 'crosshatching' strokes using a fine brush, in this case describing the volumes in a very generalised way; these are the hands of 'everyman', not the hands (nor the underlying bones or even the muscles) of any particular hands. The Halberdier's are his hands, seen and recorded at the moment of portraying them: they have his creases, his bones, his muscles, and importantly, the particular light which was on them at that time.
One perhaps subtler discrepancy between the style of the Young Man in a Red Cap and Pontormo's usual manner is in the mouth. The young man portrayed here has a fully-modelled mouth, as if copied from life; Pontormo's faces typically have a notably small but full mouth - virtually a hall-mark of his - and this is the case with the Halberdier, also supposedly a portrait (possibly of a certain Francesco Guardi). If we look at Pontormo's so-called Deposition in the Cappella Capponi in Florence, composed as it is of beautiful emotional figures, we see that nearly all of them have this typical full but small mouth (in fact, the presumed self-portrait of the artist on the extreme right is the only figure with a 'personal' mouth!) It is not however always the case, as for instance, in his Supper at Emmaus in the Uffizi where the known portraits (of monks) amongst the biblical figures in this image have particularised mouths. That said, the typical 'Pontormo mouth' of the Halberdier (for which reason the word supposedly earlier) is quite different from the mouth of the Young Man in a Red Cap.
It might be recalled as well that it was not uncommon for artists to give to their especial colleagues their own drawings and cartoons to be used by them in their works 2. It has been suggested that Pontormo may in fact have used a presumed cartoon for the Halberdier as a model for the Man in a Red Cap; to me it seems much more likely that Pontormo himself may have made the drawing - not a cartoon - for this latter portrait and that it was then painted by Bronzino, or someone else. The suggestion remains in any case at the margins of credibility; in the first place, the pose itself is hardly unusual even in real life, and the (obvious) differences in the poses of the Halberdier and the Man in a Red Cap would seem to exclude this a priori. But, more importantly, cartoons per se were normally used for large works such as frescos, where the medium and technique require a great deal of specific preparation; the painting of a portrait (on a wooden panel or a canvas) is an entirely different type of work, and given that both the portraits under discussion were painted in oils, the artist had a great deal more freedom as far as execution is concerned. Preparatory sketches were usual at that time, and, as reproduced in the catalogue, there exists at least one such preparatory drawing for the Halberdier - a drawing it might be pointed out, quite different in pose (that is, frontal) from the finished painting (the model seen from his left). The use of modern high-tech methods to analyse paintings, allowing us to 'see' behind the surface of the paint film, predictably reveals the use of drawings prior to the application of paint (a method not necessarily used by artists today for instance); this is not the same as the use of a cartoon nor does it indicate the use of one! Also in the catalogue is reproduced Pontormo's preparatory drawing for the Visitation; this drawing has been 'squared-up', that is, a grid has been drawn in red chalk on top of the original drawing. Such a technique, squaring-up, allows the artist to reliably transfer the contents of each grid square, one by one, to another surface of any size, provided the proportions are the same as in the drawing. It is plainly obvious that squaring-up (from a preparatory drawing) would have been used for a portrait of the size we are discussing here (92 x 73 cm), far more likely in fact than the use of a cartoon. We note in relation to this, that the Visitation painting, for which, as just mentioned, there is a squared-up preparatory drawing, measures 207 x 159 cm, considerably larger than either of the paintings being compared here. Whether or not a cartoon was used however, does not prove Pontormo's authorship of the Young Man in a Red Cap: it could possibly suggest that some kind of drawing by Pontormo was used as the basis for that painting.
Finally, some remarks concerning the hands in the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap. While it is clear that the hands of this young man are posed differently from those in the Halberdier picture (the left hands of both models are related however, see discussion below), the treatment of the flesh in the Young Man in a Red Cap - the folds of the skin (practically absent) and the light on both his hands (minimally indicated) - is quite different. This treatment is 'generic' whereas the treatment of the hands of the Halberdier is specific - both visually and technically: here, his right hand, for instance, has first been 'drawn' in a reddish-brown under-colour;3 later, the final flesh colours, with their highlights, have been added, allowing the under-colour to play, so to speak, a passive role as the shadows. The hands of the Young Man in a Red Cap are done, as said, more generically, with no particular focus on them as specific hands caught in a particular set of physical and ambient conditions. In fact, close-up photos on pages 88-89 in our catalogue, comparing one hand from each protagonist, show yet again in the Young Man in a Red Cap portrait the use of the fine brush hatching technique - as noted on his face - while the hand of the Halberdier is modelled to indicate not only the accidental fall of the light, but also the bony structure under the skin - again, something only vaguely hinted at in the other portrait. This problem of the hands, to my mind, is yet another important indicator that the two works under discussion were painted by different people, perhaps collaborating to some degree but not necessarily.
The hands though are an interesting study on their own: if we look at the Portrait of a Youth (Ritratto di giovane [Carlo Neroni?]) reproduced with notes by Elizabeth Cropper in the catalogue L'Officina della maniera (see Note 1), it may be supposed that both the left and right hands could be transposed, with some minor alterations, onto the Young Man in a Red Cap: while the right hand of the former work is holding an open book and the one in the latter picture is holding a letter, the splay of the fingers is the same; more similarly, the sitter's left hand (Portrait of a Youth) could easily become that of the Halberdier. In all three pictures the left hands are splayed in the same way, with the index and little fingers separated from the middle two which are closely touching; what this suggests is the possibility of studio studies of hands in various positions (such studies we know to exist by other artists), studies which have been used in these three paintings, with minor modifications. The one main difference however, is the conspicuously alternative rendition in the painting Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap; Pontormo's drawings (or exemplars) seem to have been used by an artist other than Pontormo.
For further comparison, the reader may be interested to look at photos of the following acknowledged portraits by Pontormo:
- the Portrait of Cosimo il Vecchio, about 1518, in the Uffizi - note the careful modelling of both the face and hands which, incidentally, are executed very similarly to the Halberdier's left hand;
- Double Portrait of Friends of about 1525, in Venice: to note, the very particularised treatment of especially the faces but also the hands;
- Portrait of a Youth of about 1526, in Lucca - note the treatment of the face, hair, hands and especially the orange-red 'cloak' worn by the sitter: a loose, free-flowing handling, including the softened edges, quite at odds with the manner of the Young Man in a Red Cap;
- Portrait of a Bishop (Monsignor Niccolò Ardinghelli ?) of about 1541, in Washington - again, the treatment of the face and clothes, especially the white sleeves;
- Portrait of a Gentleman with a Book of about 1542 (private collection), perhaps the most somatically enquiring and colouristically profound of all Pontormo's portraits - and clearly very different from the generalised rendering of the sitter in the Young Man in a Red Cap.
In none of these five pictures by the way, does there appear to be any trace of the fine hatching technique observed in the last-mentioned painting.
1 In the catalogue discussed here, the identification of the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap is clearly with the documented but unidentified portrait of Carlo Neroni; however, in another exhibition catalogue of some years earlier (1997, also referred to in our catalogue), L'Officina della maniera, on page 380, Elizabeth Cropper has in brackets and with a question mark suggested, along with others, that a portrait called Ritratto di Giovane of 1529-30 (Portrait of a Young Man, p 381) could also be that of Carlo Neroni. In fact, the position of the body, the turn of the head, and in particular, the splay of the fingers of the sitter's left hand are much closer to the pose of the Halberdier than are those same elements in the Young Man in a Red Cap. Even so, although the Officina Portrait of a Young Man does have these similarities, and is given as a Pontormo in that catalogue, there are some things which suggest to me at least that this portrait may also have been painted by Bronzino, with the pose resembling generally Pontormo's Halberdier. Although Bronzino began his relationship with Pontormo as his student, it later developed into a very close personal friendship and therefore the free exchange of ideas and drawings would not have been at all unusual. By the way, the earlier attribution to Alessandro Allori (mentioned above) is incorrect if the date given to the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap is accurate (c1530) as Allori was not born until 1535!
2 A well-known example of this 'largesse' is that of Michelangelo in either giving drawings to Sebastiano del Piombo or actually making them specifically for him. By the way, 'cartoon' in English is the translation of the Italian word "cartone" which means 'heavy or big paper'. Cartoons were usually, although not always, large sheets of paper, sometimes several pieces glued together to form an even larger surface, on which a full-scale preparatory drawing had been made, a drawing to serve as a guide for an exact replication in paint on a (normally large) wall, that is, to be painted in fresco on a wall. Occasionally, smaller cartoons were used also on wooden panels. There were two methods for the 'transfer' of the design or drawing: one involved the pricking of holes, with a sharp pointed tool, along the lines of the drawing, the placing of the drawing (cartoon) onto the desired place - on the wall - and then the 'pouncing' over the holes with a small bag filled with charcoal dust; the dust would pass through the holes leaving a 'join-the-dots' image of the drawing on the wall surface. The artist then had a clear model to follow. The second method of transfer involved cutting along the lines of the drawing, with a sharp knife-like tool, sometimes into the still-soft plaster of the wall to be frescoed, leaving thereby an incised image of the drawing from the now-shredded cartoon. Close examination of old pictures, both on panels and on walls (frescos) has revealed traces of both techniques: of 'pouncing' in Piero della Francesca's frescos, the Legend of the True Cross, in Arezzo; and of incising in Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling frescos.
3 This technique, as used for oil painting, was common at that time and continued to be so for centuries. It consisted in the use of an 'undercoat' in normally a reddish-brown earth colour, applied relatively thinly, as a preliminary drawing of an entire figure. When that was dry, the 'skin' colours would be applied on top, in varying thicknesses, often allowing the 'undercoat' to remain visible in the final effect, especially as shadows or reflected light. These could be further modified with the use of glazes - thin veils of colour, on top. The overall effect of a painting could also be influenced right from the very beginning, that is, by the colour of its 'priming': the base coat of white paint (or, earlier, gesso) could be given a coat of some other darker colour before the image proper was sketched onto the canvas (or panel). This base colour or primer, depending on how the artist applied his or her colours, could influence the final effect, making it warmer or cooler as the artist chose. In the nineteenth and (particularly) the twentieth centuries, many artists preferred a basic white primer and, in the case of the Impressionists (19th century) for example, a white ground helped to give brightness to their landscape images. The technique was not the same for fresco and there was far less flexibility once the plaster began to dry; however, under-painting in a reddish-brown colour (the 'sinopia') still constituted the first stage of the painting.
The Procession of the Most Holy Miracle, fresco by Cosimo Rosselli, 1486: detail of the 'sinopia' - the reddish brown underdrawing - discovered under the finished fresco during restoration (see next photo), in the church of St Ambrogio in Florence. Note as well the initial perspective lines visible in the foreground.
The complete fresco by Cosimo Rosselli, restored
Artists often made changes during the application-of-colour phase and, in this case for instance, it can be seen that Rosselli altered the position of the left hand of the central figure of the group of three young men in the centre-left foreground; incidentally, historically interesting is that amongst the figures on the left is represented the famous Humanist, Pico della Mirandola, and the one with the black cap is apparently Rosselli himself.
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