Italian, North, 'A Man holding an Armless Statuette', before 1640

A Man holding an Armless Statuette

Italian, North

Not on display

About the work

Overview

An ageing bearded man looks out of the painting, holding a statuette in his left hand. He is painted within an oval fictive stone frame and the statuette emerges from the painted space into our own, making the sitter seem all the more lifelike. The statuette indicates that the man represented here may be a sculptor or a collector – there are no other clues as to his identity.

The identity of the painter remains a mystery. The work entered the National Gallery’s collection as by the Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi, an attribution that has been proposed again more recently. The picture is certainly Italian and has been associated with both Genoese and Venetian painters, on account of its loose brushwork and fluid handling of the paint.

In-depth

An ageing bearded man looks out of the painting, holding a statuette in his left hand. He is painted within an oval fictive stone frame and the foreshortened statuette emerges from the painted space into our own, making him seem all the more lifelike. This motif of a figure coming out of a fictive frame also appears in another painting in our collection – the Self Portrait by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

The presence of the statuette suggests that the man represented here may be a sculptor or a collector, but there are no other clues as to the sitter’s identity. The statue itself is probably a reduced copy, made of plaster, after an antique sculpture. The figure’s pose is close to that of a Roman marble sculpture made around 100 BC, known as the Borghese Gladiator (Louvre, Paris). It is also reminiscent of the Kassel Apollo, a Greek bronze sculpture of Apollo known through numerous Roman marble copies (the best of which is preserved in the German town of Kassel, from which the sculpture takes its name).

The identity of the painter remains a mystery. The work came into the National Gallery’s collection as by the Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi – an attribution that was proposed again more recently. The picture is certainly Italian and has been associated with both Genoese and Venetian painters, on account of its loose brushwork and fluid handling of paint.

This painting was presented to the National Gallery by Francis Denis Lycett Green (1893–1959), a philanthropist who began buying pictures in the 1920s on the advice of some of the most notable art historians of his time. By the 1940s, Lycett Green’s collection consisted of over 130 paintings and was displayed in his country house in Goudhurst, Kent. A large proportion of his paintings went to the York Art Gallery but he also presented pictures to the National Gallery, including Giuseppe Bazzani’s Saint Anthony of Padua with the Infant Christ, a pastel portrait by Jean-Baptiste Perroneau, and a seventeenth-century painting of a woman resting on a sword (probably Saint Catherine of Alexandria).

Key facts

Details

Full title: A Man holding an Armless Statuette
Artist: Italian, North
Date made: before 1640
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 75.8 × 63.5 cm
Acquisition credit: Presented by F.D. Lycett Green through the Art Fund, 1929
Inventory number: NG4459
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection

Provenance

In the collection of Harry Kent and lent by him to the Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 1922 (no. 950). In the collection of F. D. Lycett Green by 1924 when lent to the Magnasco Society exhibition, London, 1924 (no. 34). Presented by F. D. Lycett Green, through the National Art-Collections Fund, 1929.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Michael Levey, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Schools’, London 1986; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2015

Sacred Spaces: The Lycett Green Collection

York Art Gallery

1 August 2015 - 6 March 2016

Bibliography

1922

N. Tarchiani, Mostra della pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento (exh. cat. Palazzo Pitti, 1922), Florence 1922
1924

Magnasco Society, The Magnasco Society: Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Italian Pictures of the XVII and XVIII Centuries (exh. cat. Agnew’s (Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd), 1924), London 1924
1930

London, National Gallery Archive: National Gallery Trafalgar Square and Millbank Directors' Reports 1929, 1930
1939

National Gallery, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square: Supplement to the 1929 Catalogue including Accessions to the End of 1937, London 1939
1958

The National Gallery, The National Gallery: July 1956 - June 1958, London 1958
1966

L. Mortari, Bernardo Strozzi, Rome 1966
1971

M. Levey, The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Schools, London 1971
1986

Levey, Michael, National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Schools, London 1986
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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You've viewed 6 of 13 works

Italian, North, 'A Man holding an Armless Statuette', before 1640

About the work

Overview

In-depth

Key facts

Details

Provenance

Additional information

Source

Exhibition history

Bibliography

About this record

Images

More works by Italian, North