(Cremona 1532/36 –1591)
Portrait of a musician at a harpsichord,
oil on panel, 85 x 66.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
art market, Italy;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Marco Tanzi for suggesting the attribution of the present painting and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

This painting is a rare example of Vincenzo Campi’s work as a portraitist, an area of his oeuvre which has been little studied at present. Campi is best known today for his genre paintings, such as The chicken seller, The fishmongers, The vegetable seller and The kitchen interior, all conserved in the Pinacotoca di Brera, Milan.

The sitter in the present work is elegantly dressed in a black doublet, with a white ruff and ruffled cuffs, playing a harpsichord, while focusing on the viewer. Vincenzo’s naturalistic approach is reflected in the individualisation of the sitter and this work appears to be less stylistically idealised when it is compared to the portraiture of his Cremonese contemporaries Sofonisba Anguissola (circa 1532–1625) and Bernardino Campi (1522–1591).

Stylistic and compositional devices allow this painting to be dated to the 1560s or 1570s and it can be compared to Vincenzo’s Portrait of Giulio Boccamazzo, conserved in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (inv. no. 81LC00083) which is signed and dated 1569.

It is documented that when the 11 year old Archduke Rudolf of Austria, later Emperor Rudolf II, and his brother Ernest of Austria travelled through Cremona on their way to Spain in 1563, it was Vincenzo who they sat for to paint their portraits. These works are now lost, but Vincenzo’s brother Antonio Campi wrote: ‘ancor che avesse così poco tempo di vedergli, furono nondimeno giudicati da tutti universalmente bellissimi’ [even though he had so little time to see them, they were nevertheless judged by all to be universally beautiful] (A. Campi, Cremona fedelissima città et nobilissima colonia de’ Romani rappresentata in disegno, et illustrata d’un breve historia delle cose più notabili appartenenti ad essa dei ritratti naturali dei duchi et duchesse di Milano e compendio delle lor vite, Cremona, 1585, ed. 1645, p. XLV). This would suggest that Vincenzo was more than an occasional portraitist.