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拍品專文
This striking portrait is a rare surviving work by Jacometto Veneziano, an eminent Venetian portraitist and miniaturist. Jacometto and several of his contemporaries, including Alvise Vivarini and Giovanni Bellini, were responsible for establishing a tradition of portraiture in fifteenth-century Venice. Their innovations lay the groundwork for the flourishing of the genre in the sixteenth century by successors including Giorgione, Titian and Lorenzo Lotto. This portrait is testament to the artist’s use of meticulous detail to convey the sitter’s physiognomy and his remarkable ability to create psychological depth, inspired by Antonello da Messina’s visit to Venice in the 1470s, which exercised a profound impact on Jacometto’s work, and by the tradition of Early Netherlandish portraiture.
The artist takes an unflinching look at his sitter, expertly describing the texture of the heavy folds in his neck and chin, his bulbous nose and the thick creases around his eyes. He pays close attention to the individual hairs of his eyebrows and lashes and the highlights in his irises, and waterlines outlining his penetrating gaze. This attention to physical detail creates a palpable psychological intensity that brings the sitter to life, intensified by the strong light source that contrasts with the neutral background. These characteristics all draw on Northern European examples.
Naturalism in Venetian portraiture drew significant inspiration from Early Netherlandish painters, including Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling, whose works were rooted in direct observation of the real world and circulated widely in Venice through trading networks, diplomatic and cultural exchange, and print circulation. Antonello da Messina, who visited Venice in 1475-6, adopted the three-quarter view, strict contours and dark backgrounds from such examples, in turn exerting a strong influence on Jacometto’s work. More directly, it has been widely noted that Jacometto shared a patron with Hans Memling. Bernardo Bembo (1433-1519) was an eminent Venetian humanist and collector, who also served as Venetian Ambassador to the Burgundian court in Bruges. Memling’s presumed portrait of Bembo (c. 1474; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; fig. 1) probably returned to Venice with the sitter, where it is possible that Jacometto would have encountered it. Memling’s—and subsequently Jacometto’s—naturalistic approach presumably appealed to Bembo’s humanist ideals. Jacometto’s patrons came from Venice’s noble and intellectual elite, and although the identity of the sitter is unknown, his sober dress and black beretta suggest that he was a prelate.
The group of fewer than ten small-scale portraits given to Jacometto is anchored on a pair in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, recorded in 1543 by Marcantonio Michiel in Michiel Contarini’s palace as ‘di mano di Jacometto, opera perfetissima’ (J. Morelli and G. Frizzoni, eds., Notizia d’Opere di Disegno, Bologna, 1884, p. 226.). The present portrait was first attributed to Jacometto by Federico Zeri in 1983, an attribution recently supported by Alessandro Angelini (op. cit., 2012) and Antonio Mazzotta (op. cit., 2012), both of whom suggest it was probably painted in the 1490s, when the artist was reaching his maturity and developing greater psychological depth in his portraits.
The artist takes an unflinching look at his sitter, expertly describing the texture of the heavy folds in his neck and chin, his bulbous nose and the thick creases around his eyes. He pays close attention to the individual hairs of his eyebrows and lashes and the highlights in his irises, and waterlines outlining his penetrating gaze. This attention to physical detail creates a palpable psychological intensity that brings the sitter to life, intensified by the strong light source that contrasts with the neutral background. These characteristics all draw on Northern European examples.
Naturalism in Venetian portraiture drew significant inspiration from Early Netherlandish painters, including Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling, whose works were rooted in direct observation of the real world and circulated widely in Venice through trading networks, diplomatic and cultural exchange, and print circulation. Antonello da Messina, who visited Venice in 1475-6, adopted the three-quarter view, strict contours and dark backgrounds from such examples, in turn exerting a strong influence on Jacometto’s work. More directly, it has been widely noted that Jacometto shared a patron with Hans Memling. Bernardo Bembo (1433-1519) was an eminent Venetian humanist and collector, who also served as Venetian Ambassador to the Burgundian court in Bruges. Memling’s presumed portrait of Bembo (c. 1474; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; fig. 1) probably returned to Venice with the sitter, where it is possible that Jacometto would have encountered it. Memling’s—and subsequently Jacometto’s—naturalistic approach presumably appealed to Bembo’s humanist ideals. Jacometto’s patrons came from Venice’s noble and intellectual elite, and although the identity of the sitter is unknown, his sober dress and black beretta suggest that he was a prelate.
The group of fewer than ten small-scale portraits given to Jacometto is anchored on a pair in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, recorded in 1543 by Marcantonio Michiel in Michiel Contarini’s palace as ‘di mano di Jacometto, opera perfetissima’ (J. Morelli and G. Frizzoni, eds., Notizia d’Opere di Disegno, Bologna, 1884, p. 226.). The present portrait was first attributed to Jacometto by Federico Zeri in 1983, an attribution recently supported by Alessandro Angelini (op. cit., 2012) and Antonio Mazzotta (op. cit., 2012), both of whom suggest it was probably painted in the 1490s, when the artist was reaching his maturity and developing greater psychological depth in his portraits.