Portrait of adolescent

(Bartolomeo Passerotti (Passarotti))

The portrait published by Benati and later exhibited by The Matthiesen Gallery in New York at the Newhouse Galleries, belongs to the mature phase of Passerotti’s activity. Benati compares it to the portrait of a man formerly Sacchetti collection and now Capitoline Museum in Rome.

The portrayal of the young boy, shown half-length while turning to the viewer, has some analogies with the Man in black velvet (formerly at the Matthiesen Gallery) : the picture has a delicate but thick chromatic thread; it is animated by subtle devices of the composition (the change between the position of the bust and the head). The lively expression and the ‘popular’ tone of the sitter show some connections with the pictorial experimentalism of the genre scenes.

A dating around, or shortly after, 1580.

Patrick Matthiesen, London;

Private collection.

D. Benati, Una ‘Lucrezia’ e altre proposte per Bartolomeo Passerotti, in ‘Paragone’, n. 379, 1981, p.26-35, plate 46.

F. Porzio, Tre ritratti di Bartolomeo Passerotti, in Scritti di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Federico Zeri, tomo I, 1984, pp. 427-433.

A. Ghirardi, Passerotti , 1986b, p. 555.

Matthiesen Gallery, Paintings from Emilia, 1987, p. 50, catalogue entry and fig. 10.

Hoper 1987, II, p. 66, catalogue entry G 61.

Bartolomeo Passerotti, general catalogue, 1990, entry 80, p. 255.

Tiziano e il ritratto di corte da Raffaello ai Carracci, Napoli, Museo di Capodimonte, 24 march -4 june 2006

Art Adorned, Christie’s London, 22 November – 3 December 2019