NICOLÒ DELL’ ABATE
Modena c. 1512 - Fontainebleau 1571
Portrait of a lancer, half-length, with a plumed hat
Oil on panel
64.8 x 51.4 cm
PROVENANCE
Conte Leonida Mattaroli, Castel Marino;
Dona Maria Costa, Palermo, Sicily and Plainfield, New Jersey;
Dr. Julius Held, Old Bennington, Vermont
A substantial group of portraits by Nicolò dell’ Abate were brought together in the 2005 exhibition in Modena, illustrating his substantial talents in this direction. Most of the known works date from the Italian years, even though the artist was immediately employed, on his arrival in France in 1552, on painting the portraits of the King and Queen. Although the artist’s fame in Italy came principally from the frescos he did in decorations like that of Palazzo Poggi in Bologna, the fluid technique that he adopted in this medium also permeated to his oil paintings, including the portraits. Both demonstrate the vivid colours bound in tempera grassa - in other words, in a glue suspension, a technique that can be associated with the artist’s observation of Parmigianino’s work, which he would have known from the paintings done in Bologna during the latter’s stay there in 1527-1530. Nicolò showed a sensitivity towards Venetian painters, like Bartolomeo Veneto, in portraits like the Prado Lady with a Green Turban and the Borghese Gallery Portrait of a Lady (Modena, 2005, Nos 138, 139). Another pronounced influence was certainly that of Sebastiano Del Piombo, to whom works like the Man with a Falcon in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Man with a Parrot in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, have been confused in the past. The present work has stylistic affinities with the Portrait of a Young Man in the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, but also with the realism that Parmigianino introduced into Emilian portraiture: the vivid tactile quality of the face that is so carefully worked. It is the kind of accuracy that Girolamo da Carpi practiced in neighbouring Ferrara, although he tended towards a greater parade of costume in his likenesses, like the Portrait of a Lady (Renée de France?) in the Städel, Frankfurt, or the Portrait of Girolamo de’ Vincenti in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.
This Lancer has a tremendously careful attention to detail, especially in the eye contact that we make with the sitter, the informality of the gesture of the gloved hands, one of the sitter’s thumbs supported by the band of his slashed doublet, and the black revere to his ruched shirt cuffs. Just as in the Parmigianino portrait, also in this exhibition, the cap and ostrich plume, held in place here by a gilt bronze medallion, seems to have a particular significance, just as the bejeweled hairnets of his female sitters seem to give them a social rank. The lance that he is holding is a cavalry weapon, much more useful than a sword, but it is a ceremonial attribute, rather like the halberds carried by the Swiss Guards, which combine the effect of an axe with that of a spear. The ostrich feathers are a common denominator of several of Nicolò’s portraits, as well as often being featured in the frescoes, among the musicians in Palazzo Poggi and narrative scenes now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, from Palazzo Tofanini-Zucchini Solimei.
None of Nicolò’s sitters is identified, although we know he painted his friend the humanist Carlo Sigonio, and may well have portrayed his friends in Bologna, Giovanni Andrea Bianchi and Achille Bocchi, the author of the celebrated emblem book, and he was a member of the literary Accademia Grillenzoni, in Modena where he met with the Lutheran sympathizer Ludovico Castelvetro.; he shared their intellectual curiosity in the poets of the classical past, and retained a profound knowledge of their characteristics, which he put to good use in his illustrations from literature, and from authors like Ariosto.
