Hello, DU! The Friday Afternoon Challenge returns with: Feminine Beauty in Portraits!

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45. #5: Jacopo da Pontormo - Portrait of Maria Salviate de’ Medici and Giulia de’ Medici

Faces of the Renaissance
By Mary Kay Zuravleff | HUMANITIES, January/February 2013 | Volume 34, Number 1

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The exhibition itself was prompted by (Walters Art Museum Curator Joaneath) Spicer putting a name to a face in a portrait in the Walters’s Renaissance collection. Her sleuthing identified a child who was invisible for nearly a century and reappeared only to be misunderstood. Here’s how the mystery unfolded. In 1902, Henry Walters purchased a painting created around 1539 by the Renaissance master Jacopo da Pontormo that was tentatively identified as Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), a celebrated poet. As early as 1937, art conservators who X-rayed the subject were surprised to see something beneath the surface; lo and behold, cleaning the work restored a child to the older woman.

This revelation cast doubt on the sitter ’s identity. Vittoria Colonna, a close friend of Michelangelo, was known as a pious, childless, poet. In the marketplace, her portrait would have netted more than one of “a woman and child,” which was how this painting was listed in an 1814 inventory of art belonging to descendants of the Salviati family. By 1881, the same work, cataloged as “Vittoria Colonna,” appears in the collection of Don Marcello Massarenti, which suggests that an enterprising mid-nineteenth-century dealer masked the child to enhance his profit.

Some years ago, Walters curator Edward King recognized that Maria Salviati was Pontormo’s real subject, but the fact that Maria had a son led him and others to see the child as a boy, namely Cosimo de’ Medici. As Cosimo later became duke of Florence, such a portrait would seem to hold its value; however, when Spicer looked at the painting, she didn’t recognize Cosimo. Instead, she clearly saw a young girl, whose flowing dress and braided hairstyle could be seen in another Italian portrait of that era, namely Veronese’s 1552 Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and Her Daughter Deidamia, also in the Walters collection. In fact, scholarship soon determined that the so-called boy in the Pontormo portrait was Giulia de’ Medici, Maria Salviati’s niece and ward.

Now, Spicer was hooked. Giulia was the daughter of Alessandro de’ Medici, himself widely believed to be the son of Pope Clement VII and an African slave. Alessandro was also the tyrannical duke of Florence until his assas- sination in 1537, whereupon Cosimo took over as duke, and Maria became Giulia’s guardian. Spicer sought out a painting of Alessandro believed to be a likeness rather than an idealized portrait, and she found one by Bronzino (Pontormo’s pupil), painted after 1553. Considered together, Pontormo’s and Bronzino’s paintings show a child who shares Alessandro’s features, though not his skin color. Thus, the visual evidence supported the curator’s hunch, which was informed by scholarship, history, and closely looking at her subject. Giulia was no doubt painted over not because of her parentage, but to transform Maria into the more profitable Vittoria. Nonetheless, bringing the child back into the frame helped connect the dots back to her father, probably the most prominent Renaissance man of mixed race, and his mother, a freed slave who is known to us only as Simonetta, wife of a mule driver. With this discovery came the promise of others, and Spicer wanted to bring the research she was uncovering to the public for a conversation on racial identity.

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http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/januaryfebruary/feature/faces-the-renaissance