Portrait of a Young Man

Author: Klazina Botke

This young man, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, wearing a coat with an upright collar, looks pensively at the viewer. An intriguing portrait, it is not clear whether it was drawn from life or copied from another example. Regrettably, the drawing has been very badly damaged over time, probably because of damp, and the paper has developed holes in various places. The disintegrating sheet was consolidated with a backing sheet of blue paper at a very early stage, after which the underside of the young man’s coat was retouched with black chalk.

Over the years, the work has been attributed to various Italian artists. In 1920 and 1929 it was sold at auction as a work by Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572). In the latter year it was entered in the Koenigs inventory as a drawing by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), and five years later Von Hadeln credited it to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) in his facsimile edition of Italian drawings from the Koenigs Collection.^[1] Van Regteren Altena thought that it was a study by Agostino (1557-1602) or Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), and this was adopted by the curator Haverkamp Begemann (1953).^[2] In 1996, in part because Karla Langedijk identified the young man as Francesco I de’ Medici, it was credited to the Florentine artist Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), and this has been maintained until now.^[3] Although some likeness to the painted portraits of Francesco I can be detected, however, the attribution is certainly not convincing. There are no stylistic arguments to support it, whereas those for an attribution to the Carracci are much more substantial, as recently confirmed by Van Tuyll van Serooskerken.^[4] The combination of fine hatching that creates depth and tonality in the face and the rapid, rough lines used to depict the clothes, is characteristic of the portrait drawings by the Bolognese artists Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci. They were key figures in the development of Italian art at the end of the sixteenth century. The brothers Agostino and Annibale, together with their cousin Ludovico, ran a large painters’ workshop in Bologna and in 1582 founded the Accademia dei Desiderosi there. Soon afterwards they changed the name to Accademia degli Incamminati. This was one of the first art academies in Italy. Many of their drawings have survived, even though they themselves saw little point in keeping their source material. According to their biographer Malvasia (1678), a great many sheets must have been thrown away at the time.^[5]

In technique and style, the Rotterdam sheet chimes with portrait drawings that are certainly by the Carracci. The similarities to their drawn portraits in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, among them the two black chalk studies in Windsor, are particularly evident.^[6] It remains difficult, however, to tell the hands of the three Carracci apart, especially in works from the 1580-90 period, when they were working closely together and deliberately harmonizing their style and working methods.^[7] If the subject of the portrait actually is Francesco I de’ Medici, who died in 1587 at the age of forty-six, this cannot possibly be an original portrait drawing and must have been copied from an existing example. It is much more likely, however, that this is a teenager from the Bolognese area.