Giovanni Battista Moroni 1520/4–1579
NG 1023 
‘La Dama in Rosso’ (Contessa Lucia Albani Avogadro?)

Nicholas Penny, 2004

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume I: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2004).

c. 1556–60

Oil on canvas, 155 × 106.8 cm

Support

The measurements given above are those of the stretcher. The original painted area was probably around 139 × 106 cm. The original canvas is of a medium‐ to fine‐weight tabby weave. There is slight evidence of cusping at the edges, which are irregular. These edges have been concealed with putty, which also fills some of the old tacking holes (those on the right edge are perhaps original). The canvas has been extended at the upper and lower edges with strips of canvas cut from another painting, evidently of Saint Anthony of Padua: during cleaning in 1976, his lilies were visible in the upper strip and his name in the lower one (fig. 1). The strips were probably added during a restoration in the eighteenth century, but they may perhaps date from the nineteenth. They are a response to Moroni’s frequent practice of leaving very little space between the top of the head and the edge of the canvas (see also NG 3129). The upper of the two strips is between 9 and 10 cm wide, the lower one between 7 and 8 cm. Thus we may deduce the dimensions of the original painted area as given above.

The original canvas together with the added strips is lined with glue paste onto another canvas of medium‐weight tabby weave, and this is sealed with wax. The modern stained pine stretcher has one horizontal crossbar.

Materials and Technique

There are lines of fingerprints in the transparent section of the collar. Some parts of the flesh (notably the lower right eyelid and the lips) are painted in a succession of tiny dabs. The grey of the background was painted after the face and has covered over some of the projections in the hair. The red of the upper sleeves and the puffs of the sleeves, however, were painted on top of the grey. The pigments in the red dress are red lake, vermilion and lead white. For further discussion of Moroni’s technique, see p. 196.

Conservation

On acquisition of the painting in 1876 its condition was recorded as good, though it was thought that the grey background had been repainted in such a way that it no longer displayed the ‘fine silvery tone characteristic of the master’. Minor scratches were recorded in November 1944 and July 1946. Some blisters were treated in 1955. Between December 1975 and April 1976 the painting was relined, cleaned and restored (leaving the additional strips mentioned above, but overpainting them and concealing them with the frame).

Condition

The condition is excellent. No significant abrasion, no significant paint loss and no significant change in pigment colour can be detected or suspected.

Attribution

The painting was listed together with NG 1022 as ‘quadri vecchij de casa’ by Moretto in an inventory of the Avogadro Collection made in 1715. This old attribution was accepted in subsequent accounts of notable pictures in Brescia, and, more surprisingly, by Charles Eastlake in his notes on the Fenaroli Collection in 1857. We might explain this as a slip of the pen or the memory but for the fact that Eastlake repeated the attribution in 1862.¹ By the time the painting was sold in 1876 it had been recognised as a Moroni by both Baslini and his friend Morelli. The attribution has never since been questioned.²

The Sitter, her Clothes and her Jewels

The earliest recorded reference to the painting, made in 1715 when it was in the Avogadro Palace in Brescia, identifies the sitter as the Contessa Lucia, wife of Faustino Avogadro (see biographical note below). Since a portrait of her husband by the same artist (NG 1022) was in the same collection, it would be natural for them to be similar in general appearance. In fact, the two pictures are different in size and their settings have nothing in common. They are not a pair in the sense that Moroni’s portraits of Bernardo Spini and his wife, [page 217][page 218][page 219]Pace Rivoli Spini (now in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), obviously are. In the Spini portraits (of about 1570) the architecture matches, the poses are complementary (hers is the only case of a standing full‐length portrait of a woman by Moroni), and the lighting falls from the right in his case and from the left in hers, presumably because they were to hang facing each other.³

On the other hand, Moroni painted the portraits of Gian Gerolamo Grumelli and his second wife, Isotta Brembati, and these paintings seem always to have been kept together (both are today in the collections of the Conti Moroni in Bergamo).⁴ They were not designed as companion pictures, nor were they made at the same date, and much the same differences are apparent in them as in the paintings in the National Gallery. Isotta, like Lucia, enjoyed a reputation as a poet, and she too is depicted simply as a great lady, seated in a similar chair and holding a fan. Indeed the similarities are such that we may wonder whether one was not made to emulate the other. Moroni did sometimes depict old women holding books (presumably of devotion), but he makes no reference here to the sitter’s literary attainments or her interests. The fan held by Isotta is of pink and white plumes with a gold handle, but the fan in NG 1023 is more unusual, and it is curious that the handle, which was generally the most precious part of a fan and was subject to sumptuary legislation, is concealed.⁵

The National Gallery’s portrait has long been known as the Dama in Rosso, just as the portrait of Gian Gerolamo Grumelli is known as the Cavaliere in Rosa. Pink‐ or orange‐reds were fashionable colours, but they were especially favoured by Moroni, who gave a rose‐coloured robe to the princess in the polyptych of Saint George at Fiorano al Serio, and to several of the Apostles in his painting of the Last Supper in the Chiesa di S. Maria Assunta at Romano di Lombardia (fig. 2, p. 195).⁶

The clothes of the sitter in NG 1023 are made of the most luxurious materials and they must have been of the latest fashion. Stella Mary Pearce (Newton) noted that the over‐gown, open in front, fits unusually tightly at the waist. She noted further that the distinctive braided vertical slits are found in Sofonisba Anguissola’s family group portrait in Poznań, dated 1555, and the shoulder braid is also a notable feature of one of the dresses worn in that picture.⁷ In addition, she pointed out that the checked pattern of the underdress is also found in Sofonisba’s portrait of a seated woman in Berlin, dated 1557.⁸ The relatively restrained puffs high in the arms, and distinguished from the sleeves – already found in portraits dating from the 1550s – are matched very closely in the dress of the kneeling woman in Francesco del Brina’s Madonna of the Rosary (fig. 3), dated 1563, in the Museo di Villa Guinigi, Lucca. This latter also has the same style of lace cuffs, collar and necklace, and a similar coiffure, including jewels and the single corkscrew ringlet next to each ear.⁹

Moroni’s sitter wears gold bracelets incorporating grey and black banded agate balls. The ring on her right hand seems also to be set with a grey and black stone. One eardrop is visible, suspended from a large ring with a rose ribbon that matches the ribbons in her hair.¹⁰ The eardrop includes a single pearl, matching those of the pearl necklace. The wearing of ear ornaments was entirely respectable by this date, though a quarter of a century before, when the Venetian patrician Sanudo recorded with disgust in his diary that he had seen a young woman who had adopted this Moorish custom (‘costume di more’) at a party in Venice, it must still have been a novelty.¹¹ Ear ornaments were, however, notorious as a luxury and were forbidden by Milanese sumptuary legislation of 1565.¹² The sitter’s hair, drawn back tightly at the temples, is held down by an interlaced gold band linking flat, oval green cabochons (presumably of emerald, the precious stone probably also worn in the ring on the small finger of her left hand). Just behind the gold band a braid of hair is pulled across her crown, like that in the painting of Tuccia (NG 3123) but less conspicuous.

Contessa Lucia Albani Avogadro

Lucia’s mother was the Venetian patrician Laura Longhi, who was the daughter and co‐heiress of Marcantonio Longhi, Count of Urgnano, son of Abondio Longhi, the secretary of the great condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni; her father was the [page 220]Bergamask nobleman Giangirolamo Albani (1509–1591) who was also painted by Moroni (fig. 4). An account of Giangirolamo’s father, Francesco Albani, is given in the entry for Cariani NG 2494. Francesco had played a crucial part in securing Bergamo’s loyalty to the Venetians, and the Republic was eager to reward his son, who was knighted by Doge Andrea Gritti after obtaining his doctorate at Padua in 1529. He married in Venice soon afterwards (25 March 1531) and his sons were educated there. After the death of his wife in 1539, Giangirolamo dedicated himself to learning and wrote a defence of the donation of Constantine. In 1555 the Venetians made him ‘Collateral Generale’ (vice‐commander of their armed forces on the mainland), but when the feud between his family and the Brembati culminated in the assassination of Conte Achille Brembati in S. Maria Maggiore in 1563 he was banished to the Dalmatian island of Lesina. His fortunes altered dramatically soon afterwards with the election in 1566 of Michele Ghislieri as Pope Pius V for Giangirolamo had given him refuge when the latter had made himself unpopular hunting down heretics in Bergamo. Albani was appointed protonotary apostolic, and governor of Ancona. In 1570 he was made a cardinal and in 1571 he was raised to the Roman nobility. In later years he came near to being elected pope. He was not only a man of learning but also a poet, and a friend of poets (notably Torquato Tasso).¹³

Lucia was born not long before 1534 and married her kinsman Faustino Avogadro of Brescia by special licence in 1550. Her sonnets were collected in a manuscript decorated, posthumously, with her profile portrait, which bears some resemblance to the full‐length portrait in the National Gallery.¹⁴ The sonnets were said to have been written by her ‘quando era dongella in età de anni quindeci, in sedici’ (‘when she was a maiden aged fifteen and sixteen’). But there are many testimonials to her literary reputation after her marriage. She is included in the manuscript Galleria di ritratti di donne bresciane singolari per virtù e bellezza by Marco Bona, which consists of descriptions of imaginary portrait paintings and eulogistic sonnets. Her dress is described as rich and beautiful, as befits her ‘magnificentia’, and she holds a laurel crown in each hand. And in June 1560 Giovan Matteo Bembo, Capitano of Brescia, describing a wedding in Brescia, praised her for her beauty and breeding and for her great delight in ‘buone lettere Volgari, et Latine, d’historie e di Poesia’ (‘vernacular and Latin literature, prose and poetry’).¹⁵ After the scandal of 1563 she and her husband left Brescia for Ferrara. Her husband died there in the following year and she seems to have died shortly before 1568. Thus she lived to see the revival of her family’s fortunes, but it is not clear whether she ever returned to Bergamo, where a truce between her family and the Brembati was arranged in 1568. She was survived by three sons.¹⁶ For a discussion of her poetry, see the Appendix.

Dating

The dress and coiffure could support a date between 1555 and the early 1560s; if Lucia Albani is represented, the painting probably dates from before 1563, when she left Brescia. Lendorff suggested a date after 1560, but Gould preferred the second half of the 1550s.¹⁷ Gregori places the painting soon after that of Isotta Brembati, that is, to about 1555–6, on account of the greater confidence with which the chair is employed in the composition and the more daring colour scheme.¹⁸ The rather hard outline of the figure and the tension in the pose support this early date.

Original Setting

In full‐length portraits by Moroni there is often a fairly high vanishing point: in NG 1023 it is unusually high, and to the left. This suggests that the artist anticipated a relatively high point of view, and it may be that portraiture of this sort originated in life‐size murals painted more or less at the same level as the occupants of a room. There are few references in the sixteenth century to full‐length portraits that were displayed high on a wall.¹⁹ On the other hand, it must be conceded that Moroni sometimes employed a high vanishing point in altarpieces, and these cannot have been displayed low. In any case, the impact of the National Gallery’s portrait is much increased when it is approached from the left, with our eyes more or less level with those of the sitter. The high vanishing point also enabled Moroni to emphasise the large disks of Verona marble in the paving, which not only make a decisive contribution to the colour scheme but, together with the framing bands of cream stone, create a pattern that is ingeniously related to the straight and curved members of the chair.

Acquisition

Eastlake in September 1857 did not take to the portrait: ‘Figure all distinct & rather unpleasantly so – head not very pleasing – cheek bricky – hands good.’²⁰ Five years later, on 10 October 1862 when he re‐examined the collection, he simply noted: ‘Moretto Lady in red dress seated not el’ (that is, not eligible for the National Gallery).²¹ However, Frederic Burton was delighted to buy the painting for the Gallery in 1876, in circumstances described in the entry for NG 1022. Henry Layard expressed the view that ‘our old friends the Fenaroli portraits are a great addition’ in a letter to Lady Eastlake of 17 August 1876.²² She, however, no doubt recalled her husband’s aversion to this painting, for on 22 August he declared: ‘I think that you underrate the female portrait by Moroni.’²³

Provenance

In the Avogadro Collection by 1715; inherited by the Fenaroli in 1775; sold by Count Fenaroli to Giuseppe Baslini by April 1876; purchased for the Gallery from Baslini in June 1876.

Exhibitions

Birmingham 1955, City Museum and Art Gallery; London 1978, National Gallery (1).

Framing

The painting was framed by the Gallery in the summer of 1876. This frame was transferred to a painting by Palma Giovane (NG 1866) in July 1978, when a mid‐eighteenth‐century ‘Carlo pattern’ frame was acquired from Wiggins and adapted for the Moroni in time for the National Gallery’s 1978 exhibition. In March 1985 this frame, now in store,²⁴ was replaced by a frame carved in low relief, with a continuous pattern of acanthus‐like leaves curling towards and away from the picture. This frame (of uncertain origin) appears to be an English nineteenth‐century imitation of a seventeenth‐century model (like that on Van Dyck NG 6437), but cut down and deprived of its original sight edge. The gold has worn away, exposing the red bole. Additional red has also been added, obviously to match the colours in the painting – an extreme case of a frame chosen to extend rather than contain a picture, and made without reference to the frames of neighbouring paintings.

Appendix
LUCIA ALBANI’S POETRY

Of the thirty‐one surviving poems by Lucia Albani, only four were printed in her lifetime: two sonnets appeared in an anthology entitled Rime di diversi eccelenti autori bresciani, published in Venice in 1554,²⁵ and another two were included in an anthology commemorating the death of Irene Spilembergo, published in Venice in 1561.²⁶ But Lucia’s poetry no doubt circulated in manuscript. One of her sonnets is addressed to Giovanni Bressani, another to Alessandro Allegri, and they imply a poetic exchange with these leading figures in Bergamo’s learned and literary circle, the ‘spiriti eletti’, who met in Pietro Spino’s villa, La Marigolda.²⁷

Lucia’s poetry was collected in a small manuscript volume that belonged to her distant cousin Claudio Albani, who was himself a poet and a correspondent of Torquato Tasso, and it was transcribed for Claudio by Giovanni Fortunato Lolmo²⁸ into another volume, together with a sonnet in Lucia’s praise which can be dated between 1575 and 1588.²⁹ Lolmo supplied an ornamental title‐page and a matching frontispiece featuring a bust portrait with the head turned in profile, purporting to represent Lucia. The title declares that Lucia’s poems had been rediscovered (‘ritrovati’), but it must have been known that she was a poet and some record evidently survived of the period in which her poems were mostly composed: Alcuni / sonetti de / la Signora Lucia Albana / Quando era don‐ / gella in età de / anni quindici, in sedici, di novo ritrovati, et messi in Luce. // In Bergamo per / Giovanni Fortuna‐/ to lolmo.’ The earlier manuscript was entitled ‘sonetti originali della fanciulla / sig ra Lucia Albana’. The title need not be taken literally. Not all the poems are sonnets (there is one madrigal). Lucia did not cease to write poetry after the age of sixteen – the sonnets commemorating Irene cannot be the work of her youth – but the sonnets collected in the two manuscript volumes may well be juvenile compositions. They make no reference to Brescia, where Lucia spent her early married life, but, rather, they address Bergamask poets and commemorate other Bergamask nobles, and the pastorals among them invoke Bergamo’s local rivers. Moreover, the poems refer to her ‘verd’anni’ and ‘età fiorita’ – the springtime of her life.³⁰

In 1903, when the two manuscript volumes of Lucia’s poetry belonged to Conte Alessandro Roncalli (in whose family they remain), the frontispiece and title‐page were reproduced in a limited edition of all thirty‐one poems, published in Bergamo, with a preface by Arnaldo Foresti (fig. 5). All subsequent studies of Lucia and her poetry depend upon Foresti’s biographical and bibliographical research.³¹ He confined his critical observations to a single eloquent paragraph, in which he claimed that a sincerity shone through the Petrarchan conventions that she employed, and that the poems expressed a youthful, feminine sensibility (‘femminilità’) – with all its abandoned grief and spontaneous grace – that was unusual among the numerous versifiers of the period.³² A more recent assessment emphasises the elegiac and contemplative accent, and the influence of Pietro Bembo (related by marriage to Lucia’s mother) and Della Casa.³³ The limitations of the poet are obvious enough; there is much elegant redundancy, and yet a certain urgency surprises us, even in poems that seem slight or trite. The sonnets do not form a narrative sequence and several are in pastoral voices. There is, however, a consistency of tone, and although only one of the sonnets is explicitly devotional (addressed to ‘N.S. Giesu Cristo’³⁴), Christian imagery and moral indignation colour some of the others. The poet considers her life to:
Resemble a bark in a wild ocean
Wandering, lost in the worst winter season,
Buffeted by winds and by contrary fortune
(Sembra proprio in gran mar senza governo
Nave, ch’errando vada a mezzo il verno,
Spinta dal vento, et da contraria sorte)³⁵ She lives in a cruel age, an age full of wrong, an age of iron and base mud (‘Questo pien d’errori secol rio, / Secol di ferro, anzi di fango vile’), where true love has no home, whereas:
Jason and Theseus and many ‘heroes’ more
Rejoice in deceitful tricks and victims’ grief:
But why, O Heaven, why permit such evil to endure?
(Vivon Giasoni, et Thesei, che diletto
Prendon de’ falsi inganni, et d’altrui pianti:
Ahi Ciel come sofrir puoi tanti errori?)³⁶ But she is occasionally delighted, and delightful, as when contemplating the gift of a narcissus:
It was well that, beloved by a heavenly power,
Once your vain passion had burned away,
You became a lovely and delicate flower,
For thereby, Narcissus, a fair hand may
Pluck you, and a face as sweet as yours
Smile on the beauty which you now display.
(Ben ti fu amico il Ciel, o bel Narciso,
Quando già terminò tuo furor vano,
Cangiandoti in si vago fior gentile;
Poi ch’esser colto della bella mano
Dovei di quel, che nel leggiadro viso,
>Et ne’ suoi bei sembianti, è a te simile).³⁷

Notes