The Picture and the Problems It Poses: A strongly featured woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, her hair bound and coiled tightly around her head, is depicted with her profile set implacably against a curious architectural niche open at the top and brightly illuminated by a diagonal shaft of light (the sky is largely repainted, but the rest of the painting is in relatively good condition). Over her crimson dress (a
gonna or
gamurra) she wears a dark overgarment (
pellanda), the sleeve openings of which are scalloped, or dagged (
affrappata). Similarly coiffed and dressed women may be found among the retinue of the Queen of Sheba in Piero della Francesca’s fresco cycle of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco, Arezzo.
A Conundrum: Few fifteenth-century portraits present such a conundrum as this one. The profile format was de rigueur in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, especially for female portraits, but this one poses a whole series of questions. Most broadly, at a time when female portraits tended to be formulaic, generalizing the features of the sitter so as to bring them into conformity with an poetic notion of beauty—based on literary conventions going back to Petrarch’s description of his beloved Laura in two celebrated and much emulated poems—why is this one so notably unflattering, with the sitter’s pursed lips conferring a sternness far removed from these norms? And then, to take up particular strategies of representation: Why does this sitter stare so fixedly? Is she to be imagined as though looking through a lateral opening, as in Filippo Lippi's
Portrait of a Man and Woman at a Casement (
89.15.19), the obvious point of reference for as well as counterpoint to this picture? Why is the lighting so emphatically from above, so that the sitter's ear casts a long, diagonal shadow across her neck and the shadow of her head is projected low, against the lateral wall, which is viewed in steep foreshortening? Given the fact that an architectural setting was a rarity in early fifteenth-century Italian portraiture, what is the meaning of the reductive, box-like one depicted here? Might it have been intended to have funerary connotations, establishing a commemorative function for the portrait? Or is the purpose of the emphatic perspective and the cast shadow to assert, with this illusionistic device, the living presence of the sitter? ("Through painting, the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time," wrote Alberti in a suggestive passage of his 1435 treatise on painting,
De pictura, II.25). These are not merely rhetorical questions: they indicate the parameters of our understanding of early Renaissance portraiture and the conventions and functions that informed it.
If Filippo Lippi’s
Portrait of a Man and Woman at a Casement provided the model or catalyst for this picture, Botticelli’s
Portrait of a Woman at a Window (see fig. 1 above) inaugurates the next chapter, with the sitter shown as though opening a window and gazing at the viewer from her elevated position—features that play to fifteenth-century poetics of love that seem absent here.
The Authorship of the Portrait: No less enigmatic than the depiction of the sitter is the matter of who painted it (a date of ca. 1440–55 can be pretty much ascertained on the basis of costume). Repeated technical examination eliminates the possibility that the picture is a fake—something that has occasionally been expressed informally. Initially catalogued as a work by Filippo Lippi, the picture has been ascribed to a variety of artists, all of whom, save Uccello, were affiliated with that artist. This includes Lippi’s pupil Fra Diamante[1], his one-time associate, Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano[2], an anonymous follower of Paolo Uccello[3], and another associate of Lippi’s, Fra Carnevale[4]. Although the attribution to each of these artists has its merits, the most plausible candidate remains the painter that, thanks to the archival discoveries and historical reconstruction work of Annamaria Bernacchioni,[5] we can now identify with increasing confidence as Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano (or del Cervelliera, after his father’s surname). Giovanni da Rovezzano is the probable author of a coherent group of works first identified by Werner Weisbach in 1901, the keystone of which is a triptych now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence but formerly part of the Carrand collection, hence the artist’s initial, provisional name, The Master of the Carrand Triptych.[6]
The biographical outline that follows incorporates Bernacchioni’s research. Giovanni di Francesco del Cervelliera da Rovezzano was born ca. 1418 and was probably trained by his uncle, Giuliano di Jacopo, who had a workshop on the busy Corso degli Adimari in Florence. Giovanni was one of two of Giuliano di Jacopo’s nephews who became a painter: the other was Jacopo di Antonio (for which, see the postscript below). Through his uncle’s workshop Giovanni possibly came into direct contact with Uccello as well as with Andrea del Castagno. Giovanni also had a brother, Finocchio, who was a goldsmith. In 1439, he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Brigitine convent of the Paradiso at Ripoli, near Florence (see
1997.117.9). The work does not survive, though in the past it has sometimes been identified with an altarpiece formerly in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and now in the Alana Collection. That work, instead, seems to have been painted for a sister Brigitine convent in Poggibonsi. In 1442, Giovanni established a partnership with Filippo Lippi that ended in dispute and a lawsuit. His earliest surviving work would seem to be the Carrand Triptych, mentioned above and datable between 1449 and 1451. An altar frontal in the church of San Biagio at Petriolo, where he owned property and where his mother was from, is dated January 29, 1453 (Florentine style, or 1454 modern style). In 1457, he undertook an altarpiece for the abbey of San Bartolomeo in Anghiari, the predella of which Bernacchioni identifies with a marvelous panel narrating events from the life of Saint Nicholas, now in the Casa Buonarotti, Florence. That work has attracted much scholarly attention, since in the sixteenth century it was installed as a predella beneath Donatello’s monumental tabernacle with a sculpted
Annunciation in the basilica of Santa Croce, Florence. It now appears possible that the predella was brought from Anghiari to Florence and installed below Donatello’s tabernacle by the Buonarotti family, who were related to the patron of the altarpiece and had burial rights in Santa Croce. Among Giovanni’s last works is a triptych comprised of a
Madonna and Child (Contini Bonacossi bequest to the Gallerie degli Ufizzi, Florence), a
Saint Anthony Abbot (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan), and a
Saint James the Greater (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon). A large, painted crucifix, the terminal figures of which have provided comparisons for the style of The Met’s portrait, is in the church of Sant’Andrea in Brozzi, just outside Florence. In all of these works, the art of Uccello, Lippi, Castagno, and Domenico Veneziano can be seen to have been crucial to Giovanni’s elegant, highly detailed, and geometrically informed style.
Another work clearly attributable to Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano,
Saint Anthony of Padua, (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; fig. 2) offers close analogies with The Met’s portrait. The emphatic outline of the features of the face, the shape and character of the eyes and ear, the tendency to render the form as though sculpted or part of a wood intarsia: all of these traits line up with The Met’s portrait in a way that suggests not only that they are by the same artist—Giovanni di Francesco—but are approximately contemporary. Luciano Bellosi has convincingly argued that the Berlin panel of Saint Anthony of Padua was painted in the 1440s, “in proximity to Paolo Uccello,” and a date of ca. 1445 is plausible for The Met’s portrait.[7]
Postscript: There has been considerable discussion regarding the identity of Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano and the works for which he was responsible. It now seems remarkable, but there was another, younger painter, also named Giovanni di Francesco (or, in some documents, Franco), who had an itinerary that at times paralleled Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano’s. This is Giovanni di Franco[esco] (1426–1498), who in 1442, declared that he was still learning to paint. He is probably the young man who entered Lippi’s workshop as an assistant between 1440 and 1442, and joined the painters association in 1448. He became an assistant of Baldovinetti and it may be that in this capacity, in 1458, he—and not Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano (as usually believed)—carried out a fresco on the facade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti that had been commissioned to Baldovinetti, with whose workshop Giovanni di Franco was associated. Previously, Giovanni di Franco had carried out other work for the orphans’ hospital.
Yet another figure has been confused with Giovanni da Rovezzano, and that is his cousin, Jacopo d'Antonio (1427–1454), who Bernacchioni proposes as the probable author of a related group of works formerly ascribed to an anonymous Master of Pratovecchio, whose key picture is an
Assumption of the Virgin in a church in Pratovecchio (the lateral panels are in the National Gallery, London). These works show some of the same stylistic sources as those of Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano’s—and for good reason, given their common uncle and shared artistic circles. But the paintings of Jacopo d’Antonio (if he is, indeed, the identity for the Master of Pratovecchio) are more dynamic, and thanks to a brilliant essay of the Italian art historian, Roberto Longhi, they merit a special place in the history of Florentine painting at mid-century.[8]
Keith Christiansen 2012; updated 2020
[1] See Berenson 1922, 1928, and 1932.
[2] See Longhi 1952, Zeri 1971, and Benati 1996.
[3] See Pope-Hennessy and Christiansen 1980, and Jansen 1987.
[4] See Joannides 1989 and Volpe, in Boskovits 1997.
[5] Annamaria Bernacchioni, “Proposte e conferme sulla ‘vexata Quaestio’ Maestro del Trittico Carrand e Maestro di Pratovecchio: Una perduta tavola per i Buonarroti di Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano,”
Studi di Storia dell’Arte, 31 (2020), pp. 1–12. Her work comments upon and offers a different conclusion from the arguements put forward by Takuma Ito, "L’identità di Giovanni di Francesco,"
Ricerche di storia dell’arte 84 (2004), pp. 51–69. Both authors bring forward a rich harvest of documents. Ito’s proposed identifications of Giovanni di Francesco and Giovanni di Franco, although widely accepted, have been shown by Bernacchioni to be subject to an alternative interpretation, which she further enlarges upon by other archival findings. Her interpretation has the advantage of bringing the works of art in question into sync with the dates suggested by their style.
[6] Werner Weisbach, “Der Meister der carrandisschen Tryptichons,”
Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 1901, vol. 22, pp. 35–55. For the history of attempts to identify this anonymous master, see, in addition to Bernacchioni, cited above in note 5, the entry of Matteo Ceriana in Christiansen 2005, pp. 207–9.
[7] Luciano Bellosi, “Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento,” in Luciano Bellosi, ed.,
Pittura di luce: Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento (exh. cat., Casa Buonarotti, Florence), 1990, p. 24.
[8] Roberto Longhi, “Il Maesto di Pratovecchio,”
Paragone 3, no. 35, pp. 10–37, reprinted in
Opere complete di Roberto Longhi, vol. 8, 1975, pp. 99–122. See also Christiansen 2005, pp. 164–72.
