Giulio Campi

(Cremona, 1502 - 1572)

Attributed to

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This remarkable panel painting is representative of a Mannerist portrait tradition that does not look to central Italian currents, but is instead to be related to the artistic tendencies prevalent between Emilia and Lombardy, primarily in Parma, Modena, and Cremona. The author of the portrait shows clear influences of Parmigianino, Mazzola Bedoli, Nicolò dell’Abate, and Girolamo da Carpi, without, however, being persuasively identifiable with any of these major names. Here we find a combination of nervous elegance, psychological concentration, and more naturalistic physical concreteness that seems to shift the centre of gravity of the work towards Lombardy, and specifically Cremona. Mauro Lucco has noted, in particular, its affinity with the donor figure in the Madonna with Child and Saints, painted around 1530 by Giulio Campi for the church of San Mattia in Cremona and now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Even when turning directly to the portrait production of Giulio Campi, significant points of contact can be observed with the present work, such as the Galeazzo Campi in the Uffizi.

The painting is also of considerable interest as a document of fashion and costume history, due to the care devoted to the sitter’s austere black attire, almost military in character, which seems to restore the gentleman’s primary masculine and martial identity, softened however by the white shirt collar and cuffs just visible at the edges, and by the medallion on the cap.

Finally, mention should be made of an alternative attribution hypothesis recently proposed by Beatrice Tanzi, who, by more closely relating the portrait to an Emilian context, suggests the name of the still little-known Modenese painter Gian Gherardo Dalle Catene, for whom this work would in fact constitute the first known portrait.