Portrait of a gentleman, three-quarter-length, in a black doublet and hose and a tozzo, holding gloves in his right hand

This elegant portrait depicts a standing gentleman, dressed in a paned black velvet doublet with satin sleeves and hose, complemented by a large stiff ruff and voluminous cap, called a tozzo. With his left hand resting at his hip and his right hand holding a pair of gloves, he directs an austere gaze toward the viewer.

When the painting was published by Corinna Höper in 1987, she compared it to Passerotti’s earliest signed and dated portrait, Portrait of Gentleman holding a letter, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille (fig. 1). Dated 1566, the work shares the same dignified pose and similarly slender sitter, though the present figure holds gloves rather than a letter. Angela Ghirardi, in her 1990 catalogue raisonné, acknowledges these similarities, but dates the painting to the first half of the 1580s, noting the sitter's clothing as being more typical of that date and citing comparable later portraits, such as the Portrait of a Man holding a Letter, dated circa 1585, at the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. 1932.68).

Bartolomeo Passerotti was an important Bolognese artist who first trained under Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and later worked in the Roman studio of Taddeo Zuccaro. By 1560, he had returned to Bologna, where he established his own workshop. Passerotti was celebrated for his portraiture and earned commissions from important clergymen, including Pope Pius V and Pope Gregory XIII. He also founded a museum to display his personal collection of anticaglie, which included fragments of ancient statues, engravings, drawings, paintings, medals, and cameos.