Lorenzo Costa  Ferrara 1460 – Mantua 1535
NG 2083 
Portrait (supposed to be of Battista Fiera)

Giorgia Mancini, Nicholas Penny, 2016

Extracted from:
Giorgia Mancini and Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume III: Bologna and Ferrara (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2018).

c. 1490–5

Oil on wood, 51.3 × 38.7 cm

Support

The panel is a single board of wood with the grain vertical to the image. The wood has not been identified. Although it resembles walnut, its light weight suggests that it could be a fruit wood. The panel is relatively thin (1 cm). Marks of an adze or similar hand tool on the reverse suggest that this was intended, since it is highly unlikely that such a tool would have been used to reduce the thickness of the panel at a later date. There is some woodworm damage. Old splits at the top and bottom of the panel have been mended. The two horizontal tapering channels, which are probably original, have been filled with balsa wood.

On the reverse of the panel, below the upper batten, there are traces of an old inscription, now illegible. Below this is another inscription, in what seems to be iron gall ink, which has been partially scraped away. The only legible word is ‘fiera’. Further below, there is an inscription in red paint: ‘BATTÃ. FIERA. MEDIC. MANTVA’. It has generally been assumed that this records words originally on the parapet. A seal at the top right‐hand corner authorising export of the picture dates from between 1814 and 1848 (see below, under ‘Provenance’).

Materials and technique

A gesso ground (identified as calcium sulphate of the anhydrite form by X‐ray diffraction) was applied to the panel. A thin off‐white imprimitura (a mixture of lead white and a little lead‐tin yellow) was brushed over this with horizontal strokes. Infrared reflectography and examination with a microscope did not reveal any underdrawing.

The underpaint of the purple jacket contains red lake and azurite, with varying quantities of lead white. The darker upper layer is a similar mixture, but with less lead white and with azurite of a higher grade, with larger particle size and more intense colour. The red fibres that are embedded in the paint are associated with the red lake, and indicate that dyed textile shearings were the source of the dyestuff when making the pigment. The fur at the collar has been painted wet in wet into the white paint of the shirt (fig. 1).

The underpaint of the hat is similar to that of the jacket. The first layer contains a red lake that also includes fibres. The next layer is a mixture of red lake, large particles of azurite and a little lead white. On top of this is a thick layer of opaque grey paint, which is thinner where the hat is lit, allowing the underpaint to show through. The drying cracks in the grey paint of the hat were probably caused by the complex layer structure.

The shadows in the face were created by adding a dark, opaque layer of flesh colour (containing a quite translucent brown pigment as well as a green pigment) over a lighter one. No fibres were found in the red lake used here. Some evidence of blotting, perhaps with a finger, is apparent in the shadow on the sitter’s temple, above his left eye.

The approximate area of the sitter’s hair was reserved, including some places where it extends over the hat, but some locks and individual hairs were painted over the black background. A basic orange‐brown colour was used for the hair, over which lighter and darker strands were painted. In the areas where the background of the picture can be seen through the hair, black paint was applied over the orange‐brown layer.

The background consists of a thick layer of black applied directly on top of the imprimitura. This black has been identified as lignite coal.¹ The use of this pigment has resulted in a slow‐drying paint that has developed drying cracks on the surface.

Lines marking the top of the parapet were incised in the wet paint and in some places they penetrated the priming. The parapet was painted after, and slightly over, the purple jacket. A line of opaque red earth paint applied with a fairly broad brush forms the division between light and shade on the parapet. Minute traces of gold leaf on the parapet suggest that the inscription that was once there may have been gilded, and the traces remaining are the mordant applied as part of this process. The inscription may have been added at a later date.²

Conservation

In 1950 the painting was polished with wax, which suggests that the varnish was beginning to look dull. In 1955 cracks at the top and bottom of the panel were repaired and new battens were fitted. In 1980–1 splits were secured, the battens were removed and the channels filled with balsa wood (see ‘Support’, above). In the same campaign discoloured varnish and retouchings were removed, blisters were laid, and losses and discoloration were retouched.

Condition

There are minor losses to the paint surface, also drying cracks in some areas as described under ‘Materials and [page 64][page 65] technique’. Above the sitter’s left shoulder there is a circular area of damage. The parapet is worn and has been partly repainted.

Subject, attribution and date

The sitter is depicted against a dark background, with a parapet in front of him. His head, in three‐quarter profile, is turned towards the viewer’s left, but he is looking towards the right. His teeth are just visible through his slightly parted lips. There are several warts on his left cheek. He has shoulder‐length red hair and wears a dark purple cap. His jacket, of a paler purple, is joined at the collar with a lace threaded through two brass discs. Underneath the jacket he wears a darker purple garment with a rough edge and beneath that a white shirt, both of which are just visible above the collar.

On the reverse of the panel the sitter is identified as Battista Fiera (about 1465–1538). It has been supposed that this inscription records one that was formerly visible on the parapet, but why the original inscription should not have been strengthened or remade, and why other inscriptions on the reverse should have been deleted, is not clear.

The portrait served as the model for an oval engraving of Fiera that appears on the frontispiece of an edition of his Coena notis published in 1649 (fig. 2). Carlo Avanzi (active 1630–49), the editor of this volume, described Fiera as ‘of medium stature, especially animated eyes, in his countenance and entire person tending towards elegance, he had long hair and was clean‐shaven in the fashion of time’.³ This merely suggests that NG 2083 was regarded, by the mid‐seventeenth century, as an authoritative record of Battista Fiera’s appearance. There can, however, be no certainty that the portrait was originally inscribed with his name.

The attribution of this portrait to Lorenzo Costa has never been doubted. As mentioned in the biography above, Costa had been esteemed for his skill as a portraitist since the late 1480s, when he was employed by the Bentivoglio, the leading family in Bologna, and this skill was surely a precondition for his appointment as court artist in Mantua in 1506.⁴ A date of around 1507–8 has been given to the painting,⁵ but this seems to be based on complete confidence that it is a portrait of Fiera, who was also employed by the Mantuan court. We know that by August 1508 Costa was suffering from symptoms of venereal disease.⁶ It has even been proposed that the artist was sent to Fiera, physician to the Gonzaga, and that this portrait may have been painted partly in lieu of payment for treatment.⁷ However, a letter written by Costa to Marchese Francesco II Gonzaga on 2 August 1508 states that he was under the care of Antonio da Grato.⁸

On grounds of style alone, this painting would never have been assigned so late a date. The portraits from Costa’s Mantuan period that can certainly be attributed to him, notably those in the Royal Collection and the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire,⁹ show that his portraits shared the sweet and decorous sentiment, the geometric purity of feature enlivened by wisps of hair, which can be found in his other paintings at that date, and none of the bold plasticity of feature and the sculpturally twisted locks found here. These qualities are typical of Costa’s work in the 1490s and can be found both in the Concert and in the head of John the Baptist in the so‐called Strozzi Altarpiece (NG 1119).

Costa’s earliest‐known portraits, such as the Young Man in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (about 1490) and the signed Giovanni II Bentivoglio in the Uffizi (slightly later), employ a similar format, derived from Venetian portraiture, with the sitter depicted bust‐length, behind a parapet, against a black background.¹⁰ Here, however, the shadows and the turn of the head contribute to a greater sense of drama.¹¹ With his alert eyes and parted lips, the sitter seems about to speak. The Concert is the painting by Costa with which this portrait has most in common–including exactly the same minute rendering of the teeth within the open mouth.

Related works

A drawing formerly in the Boijmans collection and now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, has been proposed as a preparatory study for this portrait.¹² However, the hesitant character of the chalk lines and the weak handling of some of the details suggest that it is in fact a copy.¹³ This seems to be confirmed by a comparison with other works assigned to Costa, such as the incisive red chalk Study of an Old Man in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 162).

Previous owners

If it were certain that this is a portrait of Battista Fiera, then it would be likely that it was the ‘picture of the said late Battista’ (‘quadrus picture prefati quondam domini Baptiste’) listed as being in the Mantuan doctor’s studiolo in an inventory compiled on 5 January 1540, three days after his death.¹⁴

A seal on the back of the panel seems to indicate that NG 2083 was exported from Milan between 1814 and 1848. The seal bears the words ‘Per l’esportaz…’ and ‘C.R. Accademia di Milano’, and a double‐headed Austrian eagle with the initials ‘F.I.’. Between 1814 and 1848 Lombardy and the Veneto were part of the Austrian empire. The initials ‘F.I.’ could denote either François I (died 1835) or Ferdinand I (abdicated 1848). In fact, it seems unlikely that the painting left Italy before the early 1870s. In a letter addressed to his cousin Giovanni Melli on 24 January 1872, Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891) wrote that he hoped to obtain for him ‘a very precious thing’, a male portrait very probably by Costa, which was in Brescia.¹⁵ This picture has been identified as NG 2083 but, in the event, it was not acquired by Morelli for himself, but was sold by him to Sir James Hudson (1810–1885) for his client John Samuel.¹⁶

John Samuel (1812–1887), a Jewish merchant and banker who established his residence in London in the late 1850s, began assembling his collection in the mid‐1860s. Advised by Morelli, with whom he had been put in contact by his friend James Hudson, Samuel acquired a collection of Italian paintings ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including works by Moroni, Moretto, Guardi and Marieschi.¹⁷

Samuel bequeathed his paintings and drawings to his nieces Anna Louisa Cohen and Lucy Cohen. In 1894 they lent the portrait by Costa–the only Emilian Renaissance painting in their collection–to the exhibition of the Ferrarese and Bolognese schools at the Burlington Fine Arts Club (no. 15).¹⁸ NG 2083, together with 25 other paintings from the John Samuel collection, was bequeathed to the National Gallery in December 1906, after the death of Lucy Cohen.

Provenance

See above. Apparently exported from Austrian north Italy before 1848 but in Brescia in 1872 and sold to John Samuel in London soon afterwards. Bequeathed to the National Gallery by Samuel’s nieces Anna Louisa and Lucy Cohen.

Framing

Since 2011 the painting has been shown in a sixteenth‐century Italian cassetta, acquired by the National Gallery in 2010, with gilding which is now distressed (fig. 3). There are two vines carved in relief in the frieze against a punched ground. They include trefoil leaves, stylised buds and flowers. The two vines are joined at the centre of the lower edge and meet at the centre of the upper one.

Appendix
Battista Fiera

Battista Fiera was born in Mantua around 1460–1, the son of the merchant Paolo Fiera and Lucia Cavriani.¹⁹ A document of 27 November 1484 describes him as ‘scolar artium’, that is, a student of medicine.²⁰ After reading medicine and logic at the university of Pavia he spent some time in Rome in the late 1480s and early 1490s, where he became a member of the circle of the humanist Pomponio Leto (1425–1498). His first published work, Coena notis, consisting of Latin epigrams on a variety of foods, was printed in Rome in 1490 with a dedication to Cardinal Raffaele Riario (1461–1521), nephew of Pope Sixtus IV (ruled 1471–84) and the foremost Roman literary patron of his day. A collection of Fiera’s poems was published in Mantua in 1515. The Hymni divini with which the volume opens were dedicated to Pope Leo X (ruled 1513–21), and some years later Fiera dedicated his De deo homine to Pope Adrian VI (ruled 1522–3), but he never secured a powerful patron in Rome. In his native Mantua, however, to which he returned in 1507, he enjoyed the protection of the Gonzaga family. He was also employed by Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) as a tutor to his children. A collection of Fiera’s writings was published in Venice in 1537, three years before his death.

Fiera’s writing was not admired by all of his contemporaries²¹ and modern critics have dismissed his poetry [page 67]as weak and obscure. But it is of great value for the study of the art of the time, especially that of Mantegna, who features as one of the participants in Fiera’s dialogue De iusticia pingenda, an exercise in the style of Lucian, which considers the way in which Justice should be represented in a painting.²² An association with Mantegna is also revealed by some poems in Fiera’s Melanysius and Sylvae, which may refer to lost works by the artist. In a poem dedicated to Isabella d’Este, Fiera describes Mantegna’s Parnassus, rather surprisingly identifying Venus and Mars as Isabella d’Este and her husband.²³

In the dedicatory letter of the Sylvae, Fiera refers to the paintings of Francesco Bonsignori (1455–1519) and Lorenzo Costa. He seems to have favoured the former for his paintings of ‘serious matters, and the burgeoning seeds of history’ (‘seria … et subnascentia rerum semina’), and the latter for his ‘cosmetic softness and blandishments’ (‘molles fucos et blandimenta’).²⁴ A poem about Isabella d’Este’s project of erecting a monument to Virgil in Mantua (De Virgilio per statuam restituto), for which Fiera acted as an advisor and for which Mantegna made a design, is included in the 1515 edition of his writings.²⁵ The poet also wrote some verses about Giulio Romano, the tomb of the Carmelite Battista Spagnoli (1447–1516), and the famous alabaster organ owned by Federico Gonzaga.²⁶

Fiera commissoned three terracotta busts for the inside of the arch of the Porta Nuova in Mantua, which was refurbished at his own expense in 1514. The arch was in via Stabili, adjacent to his house, which had been renovated by Battista and his brother in 1504, and to the cloister of the church of S. Francesco. The busts commissioned by Fiera represented Francesco Gonzaga, together with Virgil and Battista Spagnoli – that is, the ruler of Mantua with the greatest ancient and the greatest modern poet of the city.²⁷ An inscription on the arch, ‘Bonis mercurialis’, indicated that the works had been paid for from the proceeds of Fiera’s practice as a physician. In his will, Battista expressed the wish to be buried at the foot of the arch, wearing a toga and holding a book. A ducal edict of 25 June 1514 ordained that the arch and the busts be protected, but the arch was demolished in 1852 and the busts were removed to the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, where they are now displayed.²⁸ Fiera’s house was also demolished and a fresco of the Virgin and Child with the Infant John the Baptist dating from the early sixteenth century, which had adorned the facade, was also transferred to the Palazzo Ducale.²⁹

Notes