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拍品专文
This incisive profile of the Bolognese humanist Filippo Beroaldo the Elder (1453-1505) is an important example from the small but distinguished corpus of portraits by Ercole de’ Roberti. Roberto Longhi memorably spoke of the ‘forza atavica e selvaggia del genio di Ercole Roberti’ (‘the atavistic and untamed power of Ercole Roberti’s genius’) and characterized the artist as the ‘genio numero tre della pittura ferrarese’ (‘the third genius of Ferrarese painting’), ranking him alongside Cosmè Tura and Francesco del Cossa in the triumvirate that defined the so-called Officina ferrarese and revolutionized north Italian art (R. Longhi, Officina ferrarese, 1934. Seguita dagli Ampliamenti, 1940, e dai Nuovi ampliamenti, 1940-55, Florence, 1956, p. 43; M. Giansante, ‘Roberti, Ercole’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, LXXXVII, Rome, 2016). Executed with crisp, almost medal-like precision, the present panel distills that ‘genius’ to a small scale and marks a crucial point of contact between Ferrarese painting and the humanist culture of Giovanni II Bentivoglio’s Bologna.
Ercole is first documented in February 1467 as a garzone in the workshop of Gherardo da Vicenza, one of the most active painters at the Este court. While still very young, Ercole contributed to the decoration of the Salone dei Mesi in Palazzo Schifanoia, where Roberto Longhi identified his hand in the September compartment with the Triumph of Vulcan (R. Longhi, op. cit., pp. 33-41; M. Giansante, op. cit., pp. 771-776). Around 1470, he followed Francesco del Cossa to Bologna to collaborate on the Griffoni Altarpiece for San Petronio; Ercole’s contribution is now generally recognized in the predella scenes of the Miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrer (Vatican Museums) and the pilaster figures of saints, probably completed by 1473, when the contract for the altarpiece’s wooden frame was signed (M. Molteni, Ercole de’ Roberti, Cinisello Balsamo, 1995, pp. 41, 57-80).
During the following decade, his activity was primarily centered in Bologna. During these years he executed the monumental Pala Portuense for Santa Maria in Porto at Ravenna (now Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) and, most notably, the frescoes of the Garganelli Chapel in San Pietro—described by Longhi as ‘più gran fatto figurativo di tutta Italia’ (‘the greatest pictorial enterprise in all Italy’) from the years 1475-1485, and a cycle which Michelangelo is said to have acclaimed as ‘una meza Roma de bontà’ (‘half of Rome in terms of artistic quality’; R. Longhi, op. cit., pp. 128, 133). Although the frescoes were later destroyed, their impact on contemporaries, and Vasari’s unusually warm assessment of Ercole as an artist of ‘grandissima intelligenza’ remain fundamental to his critical fortune (G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori [1568], ed. G. Milanesi, III, Florence, 1878, pp. 141-148).
The present portrait most plausibly dates to the 1480s, during this intensely productive Bolognese period. Its strongest stylistic affinities, however, are with Ercole's celebrated profiles of Giovanni II Bentivoglio and his wife Ginevra Sforza (figs. 1 and 2; National Gallery of Art, Washington), executed slightly earlier, between 1474 and 1477 (J. Manca in M. Boskovits and D. A. Brown, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century, Washington, D.C., 2003, pp. 601-607). David Alan Brown has noted that the present panel ‘seems likely’ to be by the same hand as the Washington pendants, a view supported by Giovanni Sassu, who observed that few other artists could ‘enhance every element of the face and hair’ with such definition (written communication, November 2020). A further comparison can be made with the double-sided profile formerly in the collection of the Earl of Powis, a work Roberto Longhi gave to Ercole in 1934 (fig. 3; see M. Molteni, op. cit., no. 26R; R. Longhi, op. cit., pp. 180-182). Indeed, the visual parallels are striking: the taut contour of the nose and forehead, the compressed yet sensitively modeled mouth, and the slightly disheveled locks of hair at the nape all betray the ‘dry’ draftsmanship and sculptural sense of volume that Francesco Filippini identified as Ercole’s distinctive 'temperament' (F. Filippini, ‘Ercole da Ferrara ed Ercole da Bologna’, Bollettino d’arte, XI, 1917, pp. 49-64).
For much of the twentieth century, this panel was attributed to the Milanese master Ambrogio de Predis, best known for his collaboration with Leonardo da Vinci and for the celebrated profile portrait of a lady in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana—presumably because its profile format evoked Milanese court portraiture. Raimond van Marle published it as by de Predis in 1935, and Everett Fahy supported the attribution as late as 1996 (R. van Marle, op. cit., p. 455; see Sotheby’s, New York, 11 January 1996, lot 57). Federico Zeri was among the first modern scholars to re-attribute the panel to Ercole de’ Roberti, filing it accordingly in his photographic archive.
THE SITTER
The inscription identifying the sitter—PHILIPPVS BEROALDVS—is probably a slightly later (mid-sixteenth century) addition, but there is no compelling reason to doubt its accuracy. As Andrea Severi has demonstrated, the visual tradition surrounding Beroaldo’s appearance rests on a small, consistent group of early sources, including the prose biographies by his students Jean de Pins and Bartolomeo Bianchini, and a handful of extant likenesses, notably a painting in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna and the bust by Vincenzo Onofri in San Martino Maggiore (A. Severi, op. cit., pp. 3-7). De Pins described his teacher as of medium stature and dark complexion, with a long, gaunt face, thin flowing hair, and a high forehead. These features, clearly recognizable in the present panel, would have sat comfortably within the humanist topos of the ‘Sileni of Alcibiades’—the wise man whose outward plainness conceals inner brilliance (J. de Pins, Divae Catherinae Senensis simul et clarissimi viri Philippi Beroaldi Bononiensis vita, Bologna, Benedetto d’Ettore Faelli, 1505; A. Severi, op. cit., pp. 3-4).
The sitter was among the most renowned intellectuals of his generation. Born in Bologna on 7 November 1453 into a noble family, Beroaldo lost his father at the age of four and was educated under the care of his mother, Giovanna Casto. After early schooling with local masters, he studied under Francesco Puteolano (Francesco dal Pozzo) of Parma, whose pioneering work as an editor of Ovid, Catullus, and Tacitus he later acknowledged with gratitude in both his Oratio proverbiorum (1499) and his commentary on Apuleius (1500; M. Gilmore, ‘Beroaldo, Filippo (senior)’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, IX, Rome, 1967, pp. 382-384). In 1472, at only nineteen, Beroaldo was appointed professor of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Bologna. Three years later he left for Parma, where he oversaw the printing of his notes on the first book of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (1476), before traveling to Milan and Paris.
His brief tenure at the University of Paris (1476-77), where he taught to packed halls and dedicated an Oratio in laudibus Gymnasii Parisiorum to Louis de Rochechouart (Vicomte de Rochechouart, a prominent councillor of Louis XI and Charles VIII), helped disseminate Petrarchan and Ficinian currents of thought north of the Alps. It also forged friendships with figures such as Robert Gaguin and Jean de Pins that would frame his European reputation (see A. Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italia, Paris, 1953). Repeatedly recalled by his alma mater, Beroaldo finally returned to Bologna in 1479, remaining there until his death in 1505 and teaching with such success that contemporaries attested to his unusually large and international following (E. Garin, ‘Sulle relazioni tra Poliziano e Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio’, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, Florence, 1961, pp. 359-363).
Over the course of his career, Beroaldo edited and annotated over twenty classical authors—including Apuleius, Cicero, Juvenal, Lucan, Pliny the Elder, Propertius, and Suetonius—and exploited the emergent technology of print to disseminate his lectures from Bologna to Venice, Lyon, Leipzig, and Paris. His Commentarii on Apuleius’s Metamorphoses ('The Golden Ass'), with their moralizing and at times Christological reading of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, enjoyed particular success. This text helped shape later sixteenth-century visual interpretations of the myth, influencing fresco cycles by Raphael and Giulio Romano (M. Gilmore, op. cit., pp. 382-384).
Far from being a cloistered scholar, Beroaldo was deeply enmeshed in the civic and courtly life of Bentivoglio Bologna. After what his early biographers describe as a somewhat ‘licentious’ youth, he married Camilla Paleotti in 1498 and celebrated the virtues of marriage in a famous digression in his Apuleius commentary. He served as one of the city’s Elders in 1489, acted repeatedly as public orator and ambassador, and accompanied one of Giovanni II Bentivoglio’s sons to Rome in 1492 on an embassy to Pope Alexander VI. In 1502, he was among the four doctors charged with exhorting the citizens to defend Bologna against Cesare Borgia—a poignant episode that ties him directly to the final, precarious phase of Bentivoglio rule. Pico della Mirandola nicknamed him a ‘libreria vivente’ (‘living library’), and Erasmus, writing in 1523, recalled him as a celebrated figure, even as he subjected Beroaldo’s ornate Latin to the critical standards he applied to other ‘Ciceronians’ (M. Gilmore, op. cit., p. 384).
THE PROVENANCE
While the early provenance of the present portrait is unknown, it is plausible, as Severi has suggested, that it once formed part of a wider ‘uomini illustri’ series, perhaps in a studiolo or a Bentivoglio palace, of the kind that would later be codified in Paolo Giovio’s celebrated collection of portraits (A. Severi, op. cit., pp. 6-7; G. Gandolfi, Imagines Illustrium Virorum. La collezione dei ritratti dell’Università e della Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Bologna, 2010).
By 1894, the portrait had entered the celebrated Viennese collection of Dr. Albert Figdor (1843-1927). Born into a prosperous Jewish banking family with Hungarian roots, Figdor trained as a lawyer before joining his family's firm, where his interests included financing the construction of the Gotthard Railway. Following his father's death in 1876, he retired from business to devote himself entirely to collecting. Unlike many contemporaries, Figdor pursued no institutional ambition; what mattered was that each object possess, as he put it, a certain 'special something'— both cultural significance and aesthetic charm. His holdings, which contemporaries regarded as the largest private collection in Europe, encompassed paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and some three hundred pieces of furniture, as well as one of the finest Judaica collections on the continent (G. Glück, 'Dr. Albert Figdor und seine Sammlung', Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, LXI, 1928, p. 252). Among the most celebrated objects was the so-called Strozzi Sgabello, a Florentine chair of about 1489-91 that Figdor had acquired from Prince Strozzi in the 1870s and which Hans Stegmann described as 'a unicum known the world over...a masterwork of charming beauty, one of the most beautiful Florentine pieces of furniture around' (H. Stegmann, Die Holzmöbel der Sammlung Figdor, Vienna, 1907; now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). After his death, a protracted legal dispute between his heir, Margarethe Becker-Walz, and the Austrian state (which sought to prevent the collection's export under monument protection legislation) culminated in its dispersal at auction, first in Vienna with Artaria and Glückselig on 11-13 June 1930, and subsequently in Berlin with Paul Cassirer and Hugo Helbing on 29-30 September of that year. The sale was catalogued in five substantial volumes by eminent scholars including Max J. Friedländer for the paintings and Leo Planiscig for the sculpture.
Ercole is first documented in February 1467 as a garzone in the workshop of Gherardo da Vicenza, one of the most active painters at the Este court. While still very young, Ercole contributed to the decoration of the Salone dei Mesi in Palazzo Schifanoia, where Roberto Longhi identified his hand in the September compartment with the Triumph of Vulcan (R. Longhi, op. cit., pp. 33-41; M. Giansante, op. cit., pp. 771-776). Around 1470, he followed Francesco del Cossa to Bologna to collaborate on the Griffoni Altarpiece for San Petronio; Ercole’s contribution is now generally recognized in the predella scenes of the Miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrer (Vatican Museums) and the pilaster figures of saints, probably completed by 1473, when the contract for the altarpiece’s wooden frame was signed (M. Molteni, Ercole de’ Roberti, Cinisello Balsamo, 1995, pp. 41, 57-80).
During the following decade, his activity was primarily centered in Bologna. During these years he executed the monumental Pala Portuense for Santa Maria in Porto at Ravenna (now Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) and, most notably, the frescoes of the Garganelli Chapel in San Pietro—described by Longhi as ‘più gran fatto figurativo di tutta Italia’ (‘the greatest pictorial enterprise in all Italy’) from the years 1475-1485, and a cycle which Michelangelo is said to have acclaimed as ‘una meza Roma de bontà’ (‘half of Rome in terms of artistic quality’; R. Longhi, op. cit., pp. 128, 133). Although the frescoes were later destroyed, their impact on contemporaries, and Vasari’s unusually warm assessment of Ercole as an artist of ‘grandissima intelligenza’ remain fundamental to his critical fortune (G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori [1568], ed. G. Milanesi, III, Florence, 1878, pp. 141-148).
The present portrait most plausibly dates to the 1480s, during this intensely productive Bolognese period. Its strongest stylistic affinities, however, are with Ercole's celebrated profiles of Giovanni II Bentivoglio and his wife Ginevra Sforza (figs. 1 and 2; National Gallery of Art, Washington), executed slightly earlier, between 1474 and 1477 (J. Manca in M. Boskovits and D. A. Brown, Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century, Washington, D.C., 2003, pp. 601-607). David Alan Brown has noted that the present panel ‘seems likely’ to be by the same hand as the Washington pendants, a view supported by Giovanni Sassu, who observed that few other artists could ‘enhance every element of the face and hair’ with such definition (written communication, November 2020). A further comparison can be made with the double-sided profile formerly in the collection of the Earl of Powis, a work Roberto Longhi gave to Ercole in 1934 (fig. 3; see M. Molteni, op. cit., no. 26R; R. Longhi, op. cit., pp. 180-182). Indeed, the visual parallels are striking: the taut contour of the nose and forehead, the compressed yet sensitively modeled mouth, and the slightly disheveled locks of hair at the nape all betray the ‘dry’ draftsmanship and sculptural sense of volume that Francesco Filippini identified as Ercole’s distinctive 'temperament' (F. Filippini, ‘Ercole da Ferrara ed Ercole da Bologna’, Bollettino d’arte, XI, 1917, pp. 49-64).
For much of the twentieth century, this panel was attributed to the Milanese master Ambrogio de Predis, best known for his collaboration with Leonardo da Vinci and for the celebrated profile portrait of a lady in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana—presumably because its profile format evoked Milanese court portraiture. Raimond van Marle published it as by de Predis in 1935, and Everett Fahy supported the attribution as late as 1996 (R. van Marle, op. cit., p. 455; see Sotheby’s, New York, 11 January 1996, lot 57). Federico Zeri was among the first modern scholars to re-attribute the panel to Ercole de’ Roberti, filing it accordingly in his photographic archive.
THE SITTER
The inscription identifying the sitter—PHILIPPVS BEROALDVS—is probably a slightly later (mid-sixteenth century) addition, but there is no compelling reason to doubt its accuracy. As Andrea Severi has demonstrated, the visual tradition surrounding Beroaldo’s appearance rests on a small, consistent group of early sources, including the prose biographies by his students Jean de Pins and Bartolomeo Bianchini, and a handful of extant likenesses, notably a painting in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna and the bust by Vincenzo Onofri in San Martino Maggiore (A. Severi, op. cit., pp. 3-7). De Pins described his teacher as of medium stature and dark complexion, with a long, gaunt face, thin flowing hair, and a high forehead. These features, clearly recognizable in the present panel, would have sat comfortably within the humanist topos of the ‘Sileni of Alcibiades’—the wise man whose outward plainness conceals inner brilliance (J. de Pins, Divae Catherinae Senensis simul et clarissimi viri Philippi Beroaldi Bononiensis vita, Bologna, Benedetto d’Ettore Faelli, 1505; A. Severi, op. cit., pp. 3-4).
The sitter was among the most renowned intellectuals of his generation. Born in Bologna on 7 November 1453 into a noble family, Beroaldo lost his father at the age of four and was educated under the care of his mother, Giovanna Casto. After early schooling with local masters, he studied under Francesco Puteolano (Francesco dal Pozzo) of Parma, whose pioneering work as an editor of Ovid, Catullus, and Tacitus he later acknowledged with gratitude in both his Oratio proverbiorum (1499) and his commentary on Apuleius (1500; M. Gilmore, ‘Beroaldo, Filippo (senior)’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, IX, Rome, 1967, pp. 382-384). In 1472, at only nineteen, Beroaldo was appointed professor of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Bologna. Three years later he left for Parma, where he oversaw the printing of his notes on the first book of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (1476), before traveling to Milan and Paris.
His brief tenure at the University of Paris (1476-77), where he taught to packed halls and dedicated an Oratio in laudibus Gymnasii Parisiorum to Louis de Rochechouart (Vicomte de Rochechouart, a prominent councillor of Louis XI and Charles VIII), helped disseminate Petrarchan and Ficinian currents of thought north of the Alps. It also forged friendships with figures such as Robert Gaguin and Jean de Pins that would frame his European reputation (see A. Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italia, Paris, 1953). Repeatedly recalled by his alma mater, Beroaldo finally returned to Bologna in 1479, remaining there until his death in 1505 and teaching with such success that contemporaries attested to his unusually large and international following (E. Garin, ‘Sulle relazioni tra Poliziano e Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio’, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, Florence, 1961, pp. 359-363).
Over the course of his career, Beroaldo edited and annotated over twenty classical authors—including Apuleius, Cicero, Juvenal, Lucan, Pliny the Elder, Propertius, and Suetonius—and exploited the emergent technology of print to disseminate his lectures from Bologna to Venice, Lyon, Leipzig, and Paris. His Commentarii on Apuleius’s Metamorphoses ('The Golden Ass'), with their moralizing and at times Christological reading of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, enjoyed particular success. This text helped shape later sixteenth-century visual interpretations of the myth, influencing fresco cycles by Raphael and Giulio Romano (M. Gilmore, op. cit., pp. 382-384).
Far from being a cloistered scholar, Beroaldo was deeply enmeshed in the civic and courtly life of Bentivoglio Bologna. After what his early biographers describe as a somewhat ‘licentious’ youth, he married Camilla Paleotti in 1498 and celebrated the virtues of marriage in a famous digression in his Apuleius commentary. He served as one of the city’s Elders in 1489, acted repeatedly as public orator and ambassador, and accompanied one of Giovanni II Bentivoglio’s sons to Rome in 1492 on an embassy to Pope Alexander VI. In 1502, he was among the four doctors charged with exhorting the citizens to defend Bologna against Cesare Borgia—a poignant episode that ties him directly to the final, precarious phase of Bentivoglio rule. Pico della Mirandola nicknamed him a ‘libreria vivente’ (‘living library’), and Erasmus, writing in 1523, recalled him as a celebrated figure, even as he subjected Beroaldo’s ornate Latin to the critical standards he applied to other ‘Ciceronians’ (M. Gilmore, op. cit., p. 384).
THE PROVENANCE
While the early provenance of the present portrait is unknown, it is plausible, as Severi has suggested, that it once formed part of a wider ‘uomini illustri’ series, perhaps in a studiolo or a Bentivoglio palace, of the kind that would later be codified in Paolo Giovio’s celebrated collection of portraits (A. Severi, op. cit., pp. 6-7; G. Gandolfi, Imagines Illustrium Virorum. La collezione dei ritratti dell’Università e della Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Bologna, 2010).
By 1894, the portrait had entered the celebrated Viennese collection of Dr. Albert Figdor (1843-1927). Born into a prosperous Jewish banking family with Hungarian roots, Figdor trained as a lawyer before joining his family's firm, where his interests included financing the construction of the Gotthard Railway. Following his father's death in 1876, he retired from business to devote himself entirely to collecting. Unlike many contemporaries, Figdor pursued no institutional ambition; what mattered was that each object possess, as he put it, a certain 'special something'— both cultural significance and aesthetic charm. His holdings, which contemporaries regarded as the largest private collection in Europe, encompassed paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and some three hundred pieces of furniture, as well as one of the finest Judaica collections on the continent (G. Glück, 'Dr. Albert Figdor und seine Sammlung', Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, LXI, 1928, p. 252). Among the most celebrated objects was the so-called Strozzi Sgabello, a Florentine chair of about 1489-91 that Figdor had acquired from Prince Strozzi in the 1870s and which Hans Stegmann described as 'a unicum known the world over...a masterwork of charming beauty, one of the most beautiful Florentine pieces of furniture around' (H. Stegmann, Die Holzmöbel der Sammlung Figdor, Vienna, 1907; now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). After his death, a protracted legal dispute between his heir, Margarethe Becker-Walz, and the Austrian state (which sought to prevent the collection's export under monument protection legislation) culminated in its dispersal at auction, first in Vienna with Artaria and Glückselig on 11-13 June 1930, and subsequently in Berlin with Paul Cassirer and Hugo Helbing on 29-30 September of that year. The sale was catalogued in five substantial volumes by eminent scholars including Max J. Friedländer for the paintings and Leo Planiscig for the sculpture.