Portrait of a married couple: differenze tra le versioni

Versione delle 01:26, 15 nov 2007

[vai a Lorenzo Lotto]

Vai a Cassotti

Vai a Antonio Agliardi

di Mauro Lucco

tratto da

AA.VV, Lorenzo Lotto. Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, a cura di David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, Mauro Lucco, National Gallery of Art, Washington / Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997. Catalogo della mostra realizzata a Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2 novembre 1997 – 1 marzo 1998; Bergamo, Accademia Carrara, 2 aprile – 29 giugno 1998

Scheda n. 25, pp. 148-151

RIDOLFI (1648) AND TASSI (1793) recorded this painting as in the house of Jan and Jakob van Boeren in Antwerp. Attribution of the work to Lotto was made by Liphart (1915) and immediately accepted; the same can be said for identification of this painting as the one cited by Ridolfi and Tassi, made for the first time by Boschetto (1953). Berenson (1905), without knowing the painting directly but deducing his ideas from a copy then in the Guggen-heim collection in Venice, proposed a date around 1535. Most scholars now agree on a date around 1523, as proposed by Coletti (1953). Only Müller-Hofstede (1967) dates it c. 1525, and Rearick (1981) dates it c. 1521, while Ballarin (1970) believes it contemporary with the Trescore frescoes of 1524. Cortesi Bosco asserts that the painting was made in Bergamo by June 1523, before Lotto went to Trescore to paint the frescoes of the Suardi oratory. The most striking aspect of the work is its unusual iconography, which has been misinterpreted by scholars until now. That this is a portrait of a husband and wife is unanimously agreed upon, but it can be said with equal certainty that it does not fall into the category of “wedding portraits”, as investigated by van Hall (1976) and Hess (1996). For this couple, their wedding ceremony—central, for example, to the contemporaneous portraits of Marsilio Cassetti and His Bride Faustina in the Prado (cat. 21)—has been over for some time. The emblematic and symbolic meaning of the image is tied above all to the man’s gesture as he points to the squirrel, while holding a piece of paper with the inscription HOMO NUM/QUAM, making an unequivocal distinction between man and animal. Locatelli Milesi (1929) has interpreted the gesture as reinforcing the image’s moralistic-pedagogical aspects: “In it Lotto has celebrated conjugal fidelity by multiplying the symbols and allusions. In fact, the symbolic dog is balanced symmetrically by the squirrel, symbol of lust, with the statement on the paper: ‘Man never’, an affirmation of chastity underlined by the strong gaze of a man who knows how to master himself. Also the landscape alludes to the no longer fresh age of the personages and to the winds of fortune.” Since then, a certain negative connotation has been attached to the animal, even when Seidenberg (1964) misidentified it as a weasel. In 1970 Androsov (in Fomichova 1992, 196) proposed that the reference is based on a medieval legend that states in the win-ter, when food is scarce, the male squirrel turns the female out of the den. Thus, “Homo numquam” declares that the man would never do this, making himself by contrast a positive symbol. Despite the weakness of the source, found in a passage from Réau (1955), this interpretation has been sustained by Fomichova-Kustodieva-Vsevolozhskaja (1977), Zampetti (1983), and Artemeva (1990). Galis (1977) added another dimension by pointing out that the woman appears in a higher position than her husband, almost as though she were socially superior, and dominating him by placing her hand on his shoulder. For Galis, the salient aspect of the squirrel is not its symbolic meaning, but that it is asleep; the man should thus not let himself go to sleep, losing those traits of intelligence and mental agility associated with the squirrel and letting himself be “surpassed” by his wife. Without offering a clear explanation, Mariani Canova (1975) states that the inscription “contains a clear allusion to the duties of partners in a marriage to be faithful to each other.” Cortesi Bosco (1987), observing the gray-brown color of its coat, identified the animal as a dormeuse, which, as Petrus Berchorius stated in the Middle Ages, can be compared to false friends who are faithful in happy times but disappear when trouble comes. Thus, “the gentle-man expresses his firm resolve not to follow the example of the dormeuse, which becomes a promise on the part of the husband to be a good friend for better or for worse, and the wife reciprocates with an affezionate promise of faithfulness, symbolized by the little dog.” But Di Tanna (“Bestiario,” 1990) has unequivocally demonstrated that this is not a dormeuse but indeed a squirrel (sciurus vulgaris), an animal whose habitat encompasses the Orobiche region, including Bergamo, and which appears also in other Lotto paintings, such as the Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of 1522 (cat. 18). In the end, however, her whole discussion becomes inconclusive because she ignores the inscription. Instead, she sees the couple “protecting themselves from the whirl of passions and the wind of temptation metaphorically bending the two fragile trees in the background” by staying in the safe refuge of their house. Thus, they are examples of virtus opposed to the voluptas that just outside their door is shaking the world, a message that is almost too reassuringly banal. Taking up Pope-Hennessy’s analysis (1966) of the relationship between this canvas and its preparatory drawing in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, published by Berenson (1955), Hughes (1988) observes that, with respect to the Amsterdam sketch in which the poses are more natural and closer together, the canvas clearly emphasizes symbolic elements: the dog, for fidelity, and the squirrel, prudent and capable of accumulating the food which constitutes all its worldly goods. For Hughes, the inscription should not be read in terms of opposition between man and animal, but as a reference to a passage from Cicero, which says that the man who stays closed within the wall of his home and does not participate in the life of the world cannot be the cause of the world’s corruption. Seen with its connotations as a historic document, the canvas would be nothing more than a reinforcement of matrimonial ties and the progress of domesticity. Before proposing a new interpretation, however, the identity of the couple must be addressed. In 1929, Voss noticed that the man’s face seemed to be the same as one in the large Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, with the Donar Niccolò Bonghi (cat. 22), signed and dated 1523; thus he identified the man as Bonghi, who in that same year was Lotto’s landlord in Bergamo. (This suggestion is still considered valid by Artemeva [1990] and Fomichova [1992], and perhaps also by Caroli [1980].) More recently, Amaglio (1992) has proposed an identification of the couple as Antonio Agliardi—a prominent man of wealth in Bergamo and an acquaintance of Lotto—and his wife Apollonia Cassotti; this idea is based on the fact that the woman is wearing a headdress (capigliara) identical to the one worn by Agnese Avinatri, wife of Paolo Cassotti, in Previtali’s Sacra Conversazione (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). In essence, two women belonging to two different branches of the Cassotti family would have received as a wedding gift from their respective father and husband identical capigliare. Cortesi Bosco (1993) followed this path, investigating further the lives of the couple; but finding no documentary support for an opposition of the man and the squirrel, she reproposed the interpretation of a refusal to behave in the same unfruitful way “the commitment not to draw back from the responsibilities of his public office, to face adversity, not to let his wife suffer from lack of support, promising her a loyal friendship.” But given that these, whether respected or not, have been the cornerstones of Christian morality regarding marriage for more than a millennium, why would Lotto have chosen to hide them beneath a “device” with a completely new and distinct aspect? Before proposing a new interpretation, it is necessary to start at the beginning. First, around 1523, Antonio Agliardi, as Cortesi Bosco (1993) has calculated, was at least fifty-two years old, and as was commonly believed at the time, had already entered “old age” (Gilbert 1967); the man in the painting appears “mature” (that is, older than twenty-five), but not much older than Marsilio Cassotti (cat. 21), who was twenty-one in 1523. (On a visual level, he also appears younger than the thirty-seven-year-old gentleman depicted in Lotto’s painting in the Doria Pamphilj, Rome.) Second, the idea that the capigliara passed from Agnese Avinatri Cassotti to Apollonia Cassotti Agliardi is both illogical and ahistorical. If the capigliara is used as evidence of a subject’s connection to a certain family, the capigliara is granted a valence of “family emblem”; but what logic or blood tie exists between an Avinatri and a Cassotti? Certainly the two are related; they are aunt and niece. But in terms of hereditary passage of family emblems, this tie is meaningless. It would be different, perhaps, if they were mother and daughter, but at a time when married women could not administer their own money, it is rather doubtful that even a mother could have freely decided the passage of a family emblem to her daughter. In fact, in contemporary legal practice, the line of inheritance for such objects passed through the male rather than the female line. If a particular type of capigliara was a sort of emblem of the Cassotti family, then there certainly would have been very few of them, and they would have been worn by the wives of the males of the principal branches of the family, not the women who were born Cassotti but upon marrying lost even the name of the family from which they came. In fact, it is worn by the older Agnese Avinatri, a Cassotti only by marriage; it would have been worn by Margherita Arrigoni, wife of Zanin Cassotti, and also Laura Assonica, wife of the oldest son of the couple, Gian Maria—but it certainly would not have been worn by the young Faustina, wife of the younger brother Marsilio, who in the Prado canvas has a completely different headdress, nor Apollonia Cassotti, who at her marriage became an Agliardi. Third, the most surprising anomaly of the painting is that the woman is depicted in a more prominent position than her husband; this is unprecedented not only in figurative documents but also goes against the customs and laws of the time. Under sixteenth-century marriage law, a woman is completely subordinate to her husband. Is it then possible to believe that this is a “normal” married couple, when the woman is placed higher than her husband? Or does this anomaly have another justification, for example, in a symbolism that alludes to a suspension of earthly laws? What is most striking on close examination of the painting is the great contrast in the flesh tones of the two faces: his skin is quite red, particularly around his eyes and the tip of his nose, while hers is exceptionally pale, almost ghostly. She is separated from her husband; she touches his arm, but her position on the other side of the table seems to symbolize a more radical break in condition or dimension. Her unnatural fixed gaze and her unearthly pallor, her eyes turned slightly upward as though abandoning herself to sleep, a faint, or death, suggests that she, the faithful companion, has died, and is no longer of this world. As for the possibility of reading the painting as a mediated symbol, these are the years in which Lotto identifies Lucina Brembati by inserting the letters CI into the moon (“luna”) to form her name Lucina. That living and dead persons can be seen together in the same painting, according to figurative conventions that are not yet completely dear, is guaranteed half a century later by at least two examples by Lavinia Fontana: the Portrait of the Gozzadini Family (Pinacoteca, Bologna) and the Portrait of a Widow with Her Family (Brera, Milan; see Murphy 1996). Looking closely at the painting, it is obvious that the man is crying; this is indicated with a white brushstroke slightly in relief along the lower edge of his eye, wonderfully simulating a film of tears, alluded to also by the red eyes and nose. The inscription “Homo numquam” implies that the man will never act like the squirrel, but what exactly is the squirrel doing? He is sleeping, and, as reported by Pliny and Vincent de Beauvais, the squirrel sleeps when the wind is blowing most strongly, when there is a storm like the one that, seen through the window, is tormenting the landscape in the background and bending the trees. He sleeps and waits for it all to pass. In his darkest moments, in the most dramatic storms of his life, such as in the days following his wife’s death, the man is thus not allowed to be like the squirrel who in sleeping finds suspension of his pain. This idea can be reconciled with what we know of the Cassotti family. Gian Maria Cassetti, shortly before 1524, when Lotto was preparing his list of paintings for Gian Maria’s father Zanino, was happily married to Laura Assonica; they had two small daughters, Lucrezia and Isabeta, painted by the artist together with their parents in a picture (now lost) that was in their house in Via Pignolo. Soon afterward, Laura had died, because her husband was remarried at the beginning of 1525 to a certain Eufrasina, whose family name is unknown (Petrò 1992). Thus, Laura Assonica is wearing the capigliara of the Cassotti family because she is the wife, newly deceased, of the oldest son of the family, Gian Maria; he is mourning her and is lamenting that he cannot do what the squirrel can, that is, sleep and momentarily forget his pain, the storm that is blowing in his soul. This claim to be an inconsolable widower may appear to modern eyes contradicted by the fact that he remarried more or less a year later, but this was the custom of the times, when it was thought that a man could not handle the running of a household and the raising of children. It also seems that a certain emphasizing of feeling in relationships between couples was the norm in that family; Bartolomeo Cassotti de Mazzoleni started his statement of personal property dated 8 February 1526, with the words: “Possessions of myself Bartolomeo Caxotto, my first good being my wife...” (Petrò 1992). Given all these facts, the painting can be dated with more precision sometime between the second half of 1523 and 1524. Its later date with regard to Marsilio Cassotti and His Bride (cat. 21) in the Prado is unequivocally confirmed, and it becomes clear why the picture does not appear in the Account, as it was commissioned not by Zanino but by his son. The drawing in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, published by Berenson (1955), should be considered a preparatory sketch for this image; as such, it has been discussed by Pouncey (1965) and Pope-Hennessy (1966). The only dissenting voice is Ruggeri (1966), who considers the sketch a copy by Romanino. Berenson (1905) has indicated a copy of this composition in Venice, in the Guggenheim collection, but it is not known if this is the same one later (1955) in the Luigi Fagioli collection in Bergamo, which Berenson thought (1957) was an autograph replica. m. l.

PROVENANCE: Jan and Jakob van Boeren, Antwerp; acquired by the Russìan Imperial collections, by 1773; Gatchina Palace, early nineteenth century-1924; sold at auction (lot 102) by the Soviet government through the Lepke gallery in Berlin, 4 June 1929; State Hermitage Museurn, Saint Petersburg LITERATURE: Ridolfi 1648, 1914 ed., I: 146; Tassi 1793, I: 127; Liphart 1915, 5-6; Voss 1929, 41; Wescher 1929, 290; Locatelli Milesi 1929, 96-98; Thieme-Becker 1929, 23: 411; Pallucchini 1944, XXXI; Coletti, Lotto, 1953, 43; Morassi 1953, 296; Banti and Boschetto 1953, 77; Berenson 1955, 83-84; Bianconi 1955, 49-50; Berenson 1955, 83-84; Berenson 1957, 101, 103; Seidenberg 1958, 190-192; Seidenberg 1964, 78; Pouncey 1965, 12; Gould 1966, 46; Pope-Hennessy 1966, 231-233; Ruggeri 1966, 63-64; Müller Hofstede 1967, 74-75, 93; Ballarin 1970, 49; Mascherpa 1971, 56-58; Fomichova 1974, 473; Hinz 1974, 187; Cohen 1975, 135; Mariani Canova 1975, 98; Zampetti 1975, I; van Hall 1976, 292; Galis 1977, 237-240; Fomiciova-Kustodieva-Vsevolozhskaja 1977, 29; Pignatti 1979, 66; Cortesi Bosco, Affreschi, 1980, 31; Caroli 1980, 262; Ost 1981,136; Rearick 1981, 29; Zampetti, Genius, 1983, 176-177; Rosenauer 1983, 306; Cortesi Bosco 1987, 127-128; Hughes 1988, 21-23; Di Tanna, “Bestiario,” 1990, 44-50; Artemieva 1990, 56; Amaglio 1992, 17-19; Cortesi Bosco 1993, 336-349; Dal Pozzolo 1995, 38; Humfrey 1997, 70—72.