Lot No. 17


Francesco Pesenti, called il Sabbioneta


Francesco Pesenti, called il Sabbioneta - Old Master Paintings

(Cremona circa 1510/1520–1563)
Portrait of a lady seen in profile (Isabella Colonna Gonzaga?)
oil on panel, 20.5 x 16,5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Alexandre Imbert (1865–1943), Rome;
European Private Collection

We are grateful to Marco Tanzi for suggesting the attribution for the present painting.

This small panel depicts the profile of a lady shown in an almost heraldic pose, against a highly compact and dark background, and makes use of a deliberately archaising iconography. Francesco Pesenti, called il Sabbioneta(1) was probably born in the second decade of the 16th century in Cremona; his father Galeazzo was active as a painter and gilder in the cathedral from the second to fourth decade of the 16th century. Francesco was the eldest of three brothers, all painters. They were succeeded by further generations of artists. Francesco was a leading figure in the figurative culture of Cremona from the 1540s onwards, but his fame has dwindled over the centuries. However he was much acclaimed by his contemporaries, as shown by the prestige of the commissions he received. Between 1549 and 1550, Francesco worked with his brother Vincenzo on the triumphal decoration for the entry of Philip II of Spain to Cremona, as well as for the visit of Cardinal Francesco Sfondrati. However his most important commission, also in collaboration with his brother, came later. Between 1557 and 1559, Francesco and Vincenzo Pesenti were employed in decorating the vault, lunettes, pendentives and arches of the main nave of Sant’Agostino in Cremona, for which Francesco also painted the canvas of the Adoration of the Magi, datable most probably to the same years.(2) His last major work was the gilding of the organ’s casing in the Duomo, unfinished as a result of his death in 1563; the painter was buried in San Bartolomeo, Cremona, on August 10, 1563.

The artist´s style betrays a meditated fusion of elements from Mantua and Parma, forming a style in some way parallel to his youthful manner, which was more profoundly marked by the Mantuan style of Bernardino Campi. It is as a result of these stylistic features that we can attribute to him a cycle of frescos of profane subject, in a palazzo formerly the property of the Fodri family in via Beltrami at Cremona. As yet unpublished and very fragmentary in form, the frescoes show the legend of Tereus, Procne and Philomela, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In the present panel, Francesco Pesenti adopted deliberately archaising forms, creating the impression that he had to adapt an effigy passed down by a prestigious model. The profile pose might suggest a derivation from a medal: The portrait of an illustrious figure, albeit dressed in accordance with the dictates of fashion that were current in this area of the Po valley some years before. It is likely that Pesenti was explicitly requested to modify a precise and now lost prototype portraying a celebrity of the recent past. The sitter may be Isabella Gonzaga Colonna. Born in Fondi, Isabella was the only daughter of Vespasiano Colonna – Duke of Traietto, Count of Fondi and lord of numerous other minor feudal properties – and of Beatrice Appiani d’Aragona. In 1531, she married Luigi “Rodomonte” Gonzaga, imperial captain of Charles V, by whom she had a son, Vespasiano, future Duke of Sabbioneta. Widowed in 1532, a year after her son’s birth, she moved to be near her former husband’s relatives at Sabbioneta, before moving again to nearby Rivarolo because of disagreements with the family in regard to inheritance and her son’s education. She subsequently moved to Naples in 1534. Her father-in-law, Ludovico Gonzaga, founder of the Gonzaga dynasty dubbed “di Sabbioneta e Bozzolo”, opposed her decision, and after Isabella’s marriage to Filippo di Lannoy, Prince of Sulmona, in 1536, obtained an imperial decree entrusting Vespasiano to the care of his aunt Giulia Gonzaga. Isabella Colonna died in Naples in 1570, leaving all her worldly goods to her son.(3)

The hypothesis suggesting Isabella Colonna Gonzaga to be the subject of the portrait in question is based on an inevitable comparison with the portrait in widow’s weeds of the “duchessa di Traetto, contessa di Fondi e Ceccano, signora di Paliano, Olevano, Serrone, Zancati, Morulo, Acquaviva, Maranola, Carpello, Sperlonga, Monticelli, Imola, Pastena e Santa Chigia, Capranica Prenestina, Genzano, Genazzano, Guliano, Montecompatri, Sgurgola, Nettuno, Ciliano, Castel Mattia, Supino, San Lorenzo, San Vito, Ceccano, Ofi, Falvaterra, Sonnino e Vallecorsa”. The painting was included amongst the Gonzaga portraits in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna (inv. B.88), formerly in Innsbruck at the castle of Ambras, and is traditionally considered a copy of a lost work by Giulio Romano.(4) The two faces are indeed very similar, as may be seen in the slender shape of the nose, the thin outline of the eyes and the precise morphological relationship between the nose and mouth. Another effigy of Isabella exists: a stucco relief in the Galleria degli Antenati at the Palazzo Ducale of Sabbioneta, which is thought to be derived from a medallion.(5)

The little portrait in widow’s weeds is the evocation of a prototype that may be firmly dated to 1533-34, during the brief period of time in which Isabella was residing between Sabbioneta and Rivarolo, between the death of Rodomonte and her return to southern Italy. However the present panel probably reflects a prototype from a little earlier, between 1528, the year she married Rodomonte Gonzaga, celebrated in secret because Pope Clemente VII allegedly wished her to marry his nephew, Ippolito de Medici, and December of 1532, when her husband, Rodomonte, died.

We do not know who might have been the author of the original from which it was derived, nor even whether the prototype was a medallion or a painting; it might even have been one of those portraits that used to be sent to a future husband, with whom a nuptial contract had been stipulated. The fact remains that, compatibly with its status as a copy of a more noble formal character, this panel has its own stylistic autonomy, enabling us to put forward the name of Francesco Pesenti. Comparing it with his well-known works, and in particular with the two examples of the Joachim and Anna meeting at the Golden Gate in Florence and Viadana, we can note some significant analogies with the various female figures in the two panels: Above all, it is the Viadana altarpiece that shows the closest affinities in the morphology of the faces of the four figures on the right.(6) The painting seems to date earlier than the version now in Florence, which has a compositional layout apparently influenced by the Campi and Sojaro. The Viadana version instead still includes clearly Mantuan traces, which accord with the date of 1540 that was attributed to it when it first arrived in its present location. In this, it is not far removed from the triple portrait in a private collection attributed to Pesenti many years ago, when it belonged to Frascione, showing Carlo Gonzaga, marchese di Gazzuolo, with two figures, of the same period.(7) However, these are not the only useful comparisons to be made: The portrait on this panel also has links with the profile of Giovanni Bonardi or Bertoni’s widow in the Florentine panel, with that of the Virgin in the Adoration of the Magi in Sant’Agostino at Cremona and with those of some of the Augustinian saints frescoed in the lunette of the same church. This clearly reflects the artist’s style and corroborates the attribution not only of the painting in question, but also of the fragmentary frescoes in the former Fodri palazzo in Cremona.

These links with the artist’s youthful works, the refined chromatic range used and a series of extremely similar stylistic features are highly convincing reasons to believe that this presumed portrait of Isabella Colonna Gonzaga can indeed be attributed to Francesco Pesenti, known as Sabbioneta, and dated to a period shortly before the middle of the 16th century.

We are grateful to Marco Tanzi for cataloguing this lot.

Notes:
(1) For a biographical and bibliographical summary, the reader is referred to C. Nolli in I Campi e la cultura artistica cremonese del Cinquecento, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1985, pp. 152-153, 294, 475-476; M. C. Rodeschini Galati in Pittura a Cremona dal Romanico al Settecento, edited by M. Gregori, Milan 1990, pp. 271-272.
(2) C. Giannetto, Caratteri iconografici dell’osservanza agostiniana nella chiesa di S. Agostino di Cremona, in Società, cultura, luoghi al tempo di Ambrogio da Calepio, edited by M. Mencaroni Zoppetti and E. Gennaro, Bergamo 2005, figs. 3-9; G. BIFFI, Memoria per servire alla storia degli artisti cremonesi, Cremona, Biblioteca Statale, deposito Libreria Civica, 18th-century ms. with class mark AA.3.7.; critical work edited by L. Bandera Gregori, “Annali della Biblioteca Statale e Libreria Civica di Cremona”, XXXIX/2, 1988, s.i.p.
(3) F. Petrucci, see Colonna, Isabella, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 27, Rome 1982, pp. 348-349
(4) see in Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna (1531–1591). Mostra iconografica nel quarto centenario della morte, exhibition catalogue (Sabbioneta, September 7 – October 13 1991), edited by L. Ventura, Modena 1991, pp. 144-145, no. 47
(5) ibid., pp. 102-103, no. 26
(6) approx. 220 x 140 cm; the purchase for eighty lire in 1879 by the provost of San Pietro al Po in Cremona Antonio Marini from the prelate of Santa Maria Assunta e San Cristoforo in Castello a Viadana, Antonio Parazzi, is mentioned in local 18th-century sources under the misleading attribution to Francesco Scutellari in the counter-façade of the Cremonese church. Si vedano F. M. Cavazzoli, Don Antonio Parazzi nel campo delle “Arti belle”, in Mons. Antonio Parazzi (1822-1899) sacerdote, storico e archeologo nel centenario della morte, edited by G. Flisi, I-III, Viadana 1999, I, pp. 80-81, 132; U. Bocchi, Interventi rotariani nella Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta e San Cristoforo di Castello a Viadana, in Restauri e Rinvenimenti 1989-2000. Recenti interventi d’Arte sul territorio Casalasco-Viadanese, Viadana 2000, p. 19, fig. 5.
(7) P. Bertelli, in I Gonzaga delle nebbie. Storia di una dinastia cadetta nelle terre tra Oglio e Po, exhibition cat., edited by R. Roggeri and L. Ventura, Cinisello Balsamo 2008, pp. 131-133, n. 37

21.04.2015 - 18:00

Realized price: **
EUR 137,200.-
Estimate:
EUR 20,000.- to EUR 30,000.-

Francesco Pesenti, called il Sabbioneta


(Cremona circa 1510/1520–1563)
Portrait of a lady seen in profile (Isabella Colonna Gonzaga?)
oil on panel, 20.5 x 16,5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Alexandre Imbert (1865–1943), Rome;
European Private Collection

We are grateful to Marco Tanzi for suggesting the attribution for the present painting.

This small panel depicts the profile of a lady shown in an almost heraldic pose, against a highly compact and dark background, and makes use of a deliberately archaising iconography. Francesco Pesenti, called il Sabbioneta(1) was probably born in the second decade of the 16th century in Cremona; his father Galeazzo was active as a painter and gilder in the cathedral from the second to fourth decade of the 16th century. Francesco was the eldest of three brothers, all painters. They were succeeded by further generations of artists. Francesco was a leading figure in the figurative culture of Cremona from the 1540s onwards, but his fame has dwindled over the centuries. However he was much acclaimed by his contemporaries, as shown by the prestige of the commissions he received. Between 1549 and 1550, Francesco worked with his brother Vincenzo on the triumphal decoration for the entry of Philip II of Spain to Cremona, as well as for the visit of Cardinal Francesco Sfondrati. However his most important commission, also in collaboration with his brother, came later. Between 1557 and 1559, Francesco and Vincenzo Pesenti were employed in decorating the vault, lunettes, pendentives and arches of the main nave of Sant’Agostino in Cremona, for which Francesco also painted the canvas of the Adoration of the Magi, datable most probably to the same years.(2) His last major work was the gilding of the organ’s casing in the Duomo, unfinished as a result of his death in 1563; the painter was buried in San Bartolomeo, Cremona, on August 10, 1563.

The artist´s style betrays a meditated fusion of elements from Mantua and Parma, forming a style in some way parallel to his youthful manner, which was more profoundly marked by the Mantuan style of Bernardino Campi. It is as a result of these stylistic features that we can attribute to him a cycle of frescos of profane subject, in a palazzo formerly the property of the Fodri family in via Beltrami at Cremona. As yet unpublished and very fragmentary in form, the frescoes show the legend of Tereus, Procne and Philomela, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In the present panel, Francesco Pesenti adopted deliberately archaising forms, creating the impression that he had to adapt an effigy passed down by a prestigious model. The profile pose might suggest a derivation from a medal: The portrait of an illustrious figure, albeit dressed in accordance with the dictates of fashion that were current in this area of the Po valley some years before. It is likely that Pesenti was explicitly requested to modify a precise and now lost prototype portraying a celebrity of the recent past. The sitter may be Isabella Gonzaga Colonna. Born in Fondi, Isabella was the only daughter of Vespasiano Colonna – Duke of Traietto, Count of Fondi and lord of numerous other minor feudal properties – and of Beatrice Appiani d’Aragona. In 1531, she married Luigi “Rodomonte” Gonzaga, imperial captain of Charles V, by whom she had a son, Vespasiano, future Duke of Sabbioneta. Widowed in 1532, a year after her son’s birth, she moved to be near her former husband’s relatives at Sabbioneta, before moving again to nearby Rivarolo because of disagreements with the family in regard to inheritance and her son’s education. She subsequently moved to Naples in 1534. Her father-in-law, Ludovico Gonzaga, founder of the Gonzaga dynasty dubbed “di Sabbioneta e Bozzolo”, opposed her decision, and after Isabella’s marriage to Filippo di Lannoy, Prince of Sulmona, in 1536, obtained an imperial decree entrusting Vespasiano to the care of his aunt Giulia Gonzaga. Isabella Colonna died in Naples in 1570, leaving all her worldly goods to her son.(3)

The hypothesis suggesting Isabella Colonna Gonzaga to be the subject of the portrait in question is based on an inevitable comparison with the portrait in widow’s weeds of the “duchessa di Traetto, contessa di Fondi e Ceccano, signora di Paliano, Olevano, Serrone, Zancati, Morulo, Acquaviva, Maranola, Carpello, Sperlonga, Monticelli, Imola, Pastena e Santa Chigia, Capranica Prenestina, Genzano, Genazzano, Guliano, Montecompatri, Sgurgola, Nettuno, Ciliano, Castel Mattia, Supino, San Lorenzo, San Vito, Ceccano, Ofi, Falvaterra, Sonnino e Vallecorsa”. The painting was included amongst the Gonzaga portraits in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna (inv. B.88), formerly in Innsbruck at the castle of Ambras, and is traditionally considered a copy of a lost work by Giulio Romano.(4) The two faces are indeed very similar, as may be seen in the slender shape of the nose, the thin outline of the eyes and the precise morphological relationship between the nose and mouth. Another effigy of Isabella exists: a stucco relief in the Galleria degli Antenati at the Palazzo Ducale of Sabbioneta, which is thought to be derived from a medallion.(5)

The little portrait in widow’s weeds is the evocation of a prototype that may be firmly dated to 1533-34, during the brief period of time in which Isabella was residing between Sabbioneta and Rivarolo, between the death of Rodomonte and her return to southern Italy. However the present panel probably reflects a prototype from a little earlier, between 1528, the year she married Rodomonte Gonzaga, celebrated in secret because Pope Clemente VII allegedly wished her to marry his nephew, Ippolito de Medici, and December of 1532, when her husband, Rodomonte, died.

We do not know who might have been the author of the original from which it was derived, nor even whether the prototype was a medallion or a painting; it might even have been one of those portraits that used to be sent to a future husband, with whom a nuptial contract had been stipulated. The fact remains that, compatibly with its status as a copy of a more noble formal character, this panel has its own stylistic autonomy, enabling us to put forward the name of Francesco Pesenti. Comparing it with his well-known works, and in particular with the two examples of the Joachim and Anna meeting at the Golden Gate in Florence and Viadana, we can note some significant analogies with the various female figures in the two panels: Above all, it is the Viadana altarpiece that shows the closest affinities in the morphology of the faces of the four figures on the right.(6) The painting seems to date earlier than the version now in Florence, which has a compositional layout apparently influenced by the Campi and Sojaro. The Viadana version instead still includes clearly Mantuan traces, which accord with the date of 1540 that was attributed to it when it first arrived in its present location. In this, it is not far removed from the triple portrait in a private collection attributed to Pesenti many years ago, when it belonged to Frascione, showing Carlo Gonzaga, marchese di Gazzuolo, with two figures, of the same period.(7) However, these are not the only useful comparisons to be made: The portrait on this panel also has links with the profile of Giovanni Bonardi or Bertoni’s widow in the Florentine panel, with that of the Virgin in the Adoration of the Magi in Sant’Agostino at Cremona and with those of some of the Augustinian saints frescoed in the lunette of the same church. This clearly reflects the artist’s style and corroborates the attribution not only of the painting in question, but also of the fragmentary frescoes in the former Fodri palazzo in Cremona.

These links with the artist’s youthful works, the refined chromatic range used and a series of extremely similar stylistic features are highly convincing reasons to believe that this presumed portrait of Isabella Colonna Gonzaga can indeed be attributed to Francesco Pesenti, known as Sabbioneta, and dated to a period shortly before the middle of the 16th century.

We are grateful to Marco Tanzi for cataloguing this lot.

Notes:
(1) For a biographical and bibliographical summary, the reader is referred to C. Nolli in I Campi e la cultura artistica cremonese del Cinquecento, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1985, pp. 152-153, 294, 475-476; M. C. Rodeschini Galati in Pittura a Cremona dal Romanico al Settecento, edited by M. Gregori, Milan 1990, pp. 271-272.
(2) C. Giannetto, Caratteri iconografici dell’osservanza agostiniana nella chiesa di S. Agostino di Cremona, in Società, cultura, luoghi al tempo di Ambrogio da Calepio, edited by M. Mencaroni Zoppetti and E. Gennaro, Bergamo 2005, figs. 3-9; G. BIFFI, Memoria per servire alla storia degli artisti cremonesi, Cremona, Biblioteca Statale, deposito Libreria Civica, 18th-century ms. with class mark AA.3.7.; critical work edited by L. Bandera Gregori, “Annali della Biblioteca Statale e Libreria Civica di Cremona”, XXXIX/2, 1988, s.i.p.
(3) F. Petrucci, see Colonna, Isabella, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 27, Rome 1982, pp. 348-349
(4) see in Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna (1531–1591). Mostra iconografica nel quarto centenario della morte, exhibition catalogue (Sabbioneta, September 7 – October 13 1991), edited by L. Ventura, Modena 1991, pp. 144-145, no. 47
(5) ibid., pp. 102-103, no. 26
(6) approx. 220 x 140 cm; the purchase for eighty lire in 1879 by the provost of San Pietro al Po in Cremona Antonio Marini from the prelate of Santa Maria Assunta e San Cristoforo in Castello a Viadana, Antonio Parazzi, is mentioned in local 18th-century sources under the misleading attribution to Francesco Scutellari in the counter-façade of the Cremonese church. Si vedano F. M. Cavazzoli, Don Antonio Parazzi nel campo delle “Arti belle”, in Mons. Antonio Parazzi (1822-1899) sacerdote, storico e archeologo nel centenario della morte, edited by G. Flisi, I-III, Viadana 1999, I, pp. 80-81, 132; U. Bocchi, Interventi rotariani nella Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta e San Cristoforo di Castello a Viadana, in Restauri e Rinvenimenti 1989-2000. Recenti interventi d’Arte sul territorio Casalasco-Viadanese, Viadana 2000, p. 19, fig. 5.
(7) P. Bertelli, in I Gonzaga delle nebbie. Storia di una dinastia cadetta nelle terre tra Oglio e Po, exhibition cat., edited by R. Roggeri and L. Ventura, Cinisello Balsamo 2008, pp. 131-133, n. 37


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Auction: Old Master Paintings
Auction type: Saleroom auction
Date: 21.04.2015 - 18:00
Location: Vienna | Palais Dorotheum
Exhibition: 11.04. - 21.04.2015


** Purchase price incl. charges and taxes

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