A portrait true to (Spanish court) life
Until fairly recently, Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese was not one of the paintings I would have made a beeline for when calling in the National Gallery of Ireland. And yet, it was the one I went looking for when the gallery finally re-opened its doors to visitors in May.
Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532-1625), Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese (1545-1592), later Duke of Parma and Piacenza, c.1560. © National Gallery of Ireland
Back in April, when Ireland was still in lockdown, an online guided visit to the exhibition Le Signore dell’Arte. Storie di donne tra ‘500 e ‘600 at Palazzo Reale in Milan had piqued my interest in the Italian sixteenth-century artist Sofonisba Anguissola, and this portrait in particular painted around 1560. Not knowing if I could make it to Italy before the closing of the exhibition, I ordered the catalogue. It proved to be a truly informative and inspiring volume, so much so I would strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to fill in the male-dominated art history gaps.
Among the information gathered from the National Gallery’s website, my starting point, was the fact that the attribution of this portrait to Sofonisba had the unintended consequence of making it the first painting by a female artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection. Then, Michael Cole’s Sofonisba monograph – apologies if you were expecting some art sleuth secrets revealed here – informed me that the portrait had been the object (it still is) of a lively attribution debate since 1864 - the year when it entered the national Irish collection as Portrait of Don Carlos by Alonso Sánchez Coello or Anthonis Mor, both leading portrait painters at the court of Philip II of Spain. Not long after, at the beginning of the 1900s, the painting was attributed to Sánchez Coello and labelled Portrait of a young man, probably a Spanish prince. And a prince he was indeed, though not exactly a Spanish one. The subject – Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza – was identified during the 1930s and the painting attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola in the 1980s.
I would have liked to follow the bibliographic trail to discover the methods that enabled the identification of the subject and the attribution of the artwork to the Italian artist, but unfortunately, old issues of the relevant magazines are still unavailable to the public of the National Library. Having said that, the title of the article – The Iconography of Costume – published by fashion historian Francis M. Kelly during the 1930s on Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, suggests that clothes may have played an essential role in the identification of the portrait’s subject.
Instrumental in attributing this painting to Sofonisba was another portrait of the same subject painted in 1577 by Anthonis Mor and now in the Galleria Nazionale di Parma’s collection.
Anthonis Mor (c.1516-1576/7), Ritratto del duca Alessandro Farnese, 1557. Galleria Nazionale di Parma
Nosing around the Italian art gallery’s online collection, I came across another Ritratto del duca Alessandro Farnese, painted (this time without a shadow of a doubt) by Sánchez Coello around 1559.
Alonso Sánchez Coello (c.1531-1588), Ritratto del duca Alessandro Farnese, c.1559. Galleria Nazionale di Parma
So, who was this young prince who got to be painted three times by three different artists in the space of three years?
Alessandro Farnese was the grandson of Charles V – his mother, Margaret, being the emperor’s illegitimate daughter – and great-grandson of Pope Paul III. He didn’t grow to become the cardinal painted twice by Titian (Cardinal Alessandro Farnese was his uncle), but the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. When still a teenager, Alessandro was sent to live with his uncle Philip II, first in Brussel and then Madrid, to guarantee the loyalty of the Farnese family to the Habsburg king - hence all the attention from the Spanish court painters.
Sofonisba Anguissola went to live at the Spanish court as lady-in-waiting and painting instructor to the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth of Valois, who was about to become Philip II’s third wife. Although I have often read that the painter was invited, I wonder how she may have refused such an offer when the Duchy of Milan, which governed the artist’s hometown of Cremona, was at the time part of the Spanish Empire.
The artist spent fourteen years at the Spanish court. During this time she kept painting but, possibly because employed for other duties, left unsigned all her works - Alessandro Farnese’s portrait included. To make things even more difficult for future art historians, at the time Spanish court painters were painting in an almost identical style. Putting aside regional differentiation and resisting any temptation of experimenting with format and composition, Anthonis Mor, Alonso Sánchez Coello and Sofonisba Anguissola produced portraits with characteristics so similar that reading the description of one of them (try for instance this portrait of another fifteen-year-old boy, by Coello) you may think it refers to Alessandro Farnese’s portrait.
And yet, there are stylistic differences. The portrait in the Irish collection is remarkable for what has been referred to as ‘the Lombard softness’, that is the subtle light effects and gentle shading of the Italian prince’s face and hands. Also, the grey background, favoured over the green one used by the Spaniards, seems to have the effect of making the fabrics stand out. The pyramidal composition with the head in three-quarter view and body rotating slightly, allows a thorough examination of the subject’s clothes. If Sofonisba was looking for a way to fight the tedium of court life, she may well have found one in the fine depiction of the ermine lined clock with silver thread and pearl decoration, shirt and hose the duke is wearing.
Even though the attention to details brings Bronzino’s portraits to mind, the subject of Sofonisba’s portrait doesn’t show the arrogance of those painted by the Florentine Mannerist artist. Still, the fifteen-year-old prince shows authority knowing already how to stand.
The fact that some art historians still support the old attribution to Sánchez Coello, whereas others believe there might be other paintings by Sofonisba still misattributed to the Spaniard (this seems to be directly proportional to Sofonisba’s work becoming more widely known), makes Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese even worthier of a special visit to the National Gallery of Ireland.
Learn more about the careers of Sofonisba Anguissola and other notable early modern Italian women painters in this free online art appreciation course.
