(Florence circa 1515–1598 Rome)
Portrait of a Gentleman, three-quarter length, wearing a black cap, a pair of gloves in his right hand, his left hand resting on a book, before a green curtain,
oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 111.5 x 86.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Palazzo Capponi, Florence;
Vicomte Jules de Peyronnet (1804-1872);
thence by descent to his granddaughter, Lady Mary Isabel Peyronnet Browne (1881-1947), Mount Browne, Guildford, Surrey;
her deceased sale, Christie’s, 12 March 1948, lot 114 (as Bronzino, ‘Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli’, for 120 Guineas to Agnew’s, London);
with Thos. Agnew and Sons, London (as Bronzino);
Private European collection;
sale, Christie’s, London, 8 December 2015, lot 17 (as Jacopino del Conte);
where acquired by the present owner

Literature:
S. Lecchini Giovannoni, Alcune proposte per l’attività ritrattistica di Alessandro Allori, in: Antichità viva, VII, 1, 1968, pp. 53 and 54, fig. 11 (as Alessandro Allori);
F. Zeri, Rivedendo Jacopino del Conte, in: Antologia di belle arti, VI, 1978, p. 120, fig. 14 (as Jacopino del Conte);
F. Zeri, Rivedendo Jacopino del Conte, in: Giorno per giorno nella pittura. Scritti sull’arte italiana del Cinquecento, Turin 1994, p. 81, fig. 137(as Jacopino del Conte);
M. Corso, Jacopino del Conte nel contesto artistico romano tra gli anni trenta e gli anni cinquanta del Cinquecento, Phd diss., Università degli Studi Roma Tre, 2014, p. 177, ill. p. 445, fig. 150 (as Jacopino del Conte)

The Florentine painter Jacopino del Conte was a significant portraitist in sixteenth-century Rome. In the 1568 edition of his Vite, Giorgio Vasari lists him among the pupils of Mannerist painter Andrea del Sarto (see G. Vasari, Le vite d’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. VI, Florence 1987, p. 222). Vasari states that the artist portrayed the most important members of the Roman aristocracy and all the Popes of his time, as the biographer Giovanni Baglione also wrote about a century later (see G. Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti, dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII. del 1572. In fino a’ tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642 ecc…, Rome 1642, p. 75). Indeed, after moving to Rome in the late 1530s and painting a fresco cycle in the oratory of San Giovanni Decollato, Jacopino del Conte dedicated himself to portraiture almost exclusively. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ignatius Loyola and Pope Paul III were among his most celebrated sitters.

The present painting shows a young man depicted three-quarter length and dressed in a black velvet doublet with a white lace collar and a black cap. As he looks out at the viewer, the man holds a pair of leather gloves in his right hand and rests his left hand on a book placed vertically on a table covered by a reddish cloth before a green curtain. On the left are architectural elements and a window, from where light enters illuminating the sitter.

The present painting was given to Agnolo Bronzino (Florence 1503-1572) (see provenance), whose work del Conte may have encountered in Florence. The similar format with the sitter’s hand on a book in his Portrait of a Young Man (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) may have suggested such an attribution. In 1968, Simona Lecchini Giovannoni attributed the present work to Alessandro Allori (see literature). Federico Zeri later included this portrait within Jacopino del Conte’s corpus of works (see literature).

The present work can be compared to other portraits by Jacopino del Conte including the Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, (see fig. 1). The background in particular is similar to that of the present work: on the left, are the same architectural structures, with light falling through a comparable window, illuminating the sitters and revealing the precious materials of their garments. As in the present portrait, a curtain covers the rest of the background in the Vienna painting and Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi also holds a pair of gloves, one of his fingers slightly more bent than the others. This detail also appears in another work by del Conte, the Portrait of Bindo Altoviti (Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Montréal). The present work can also be compared to the Portrait of Paul III with Ottavio Farnese (Barsanti Collection, Rome), where the appearance and bearing of Ottavio are closely reminiscent of those of the young man in the present portrait.

Comparison with the Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi, dating to about 1545, suggests that the present work was probably executed during the mid or late 1540s (see op. cit. Zeri, 1978, p. 81).

Although the sitter of the present work was considered to be Niccolò Machiavelli (see provenance), there is no visual or documentary evidence to confirm the identification. As Vasari and Baglione state del Conte mainly worked for the Roman aristocracy of the time, and the sitter in this portrait most probably belonged to that social elite as his elegant doublet suggests that he was a nobleman. The figure’s self-controlled image, the simple background and the lack of excessive ornamental details fitted in with the austere visual culture characterised by the Counter Reformation.