Portrait of a philosopher, half-length, seated, in a black cloak and satin jacket and a white shirt, his hand resting on an hour glass sitting on a book, a trunk beneath oil on canvas 35 x 26 3/8 in. (88.8 x 66.9 cm.)
London, The British Institution, 1859, no. 82, as Scarsellino. Manchester, City Art Gallery, Between Renaissance and Baroque. European Art 1520-1600, March-April 1965, no. 152, p. 50, as Bedoli. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Nell'eta di Coreggio e dei Caracci, 1986, no. 12, pp. 68-9, as Gerolamo Bedoli, dated to the 1550s. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, on loan, circa 1985-2005.
Literature
Jean-Baptiste Wicar, 1825 Inventory of the Camuccini Collection, in F. Beaucamp, Le peinture lillois Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Lille [1939], II, pp. 567-8. T. Barberi, Catalogo ragionato della Galleria Camuccini in Roma da Tito Barberi, c. 1851, MS catalogue of the Camuccini Collection, Alnwick Castle, no. 16 (as 'Ippolito Scarsella, detto lo Scarsellino...Ritratto ignoto...e dagli emblemi del libro e dell'orologio a polvere...'). L. Fröhlich-Bum, 'Zu Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli' in Festschrift Eberhard Haufstaenl, Munich, 1961, p. 38, as Bedoli. M. di Giampaolo, 'Girolamo Bedoli: un disegno inedito per un dipinto poco noto', in Civiltà Mantovana, 10, 1970, p. 51, as Bedoli. M. Mattioli, 'Girolamo Bedoli' in Contributi dell'Istituto di Storia dell'Arte Medioevale e Moderna, 3rd Series, 2, 1972, p. 228, as Bedoli, dated to the early 1560s. A.R. Milstein, The Paintings of Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli, New York and London, 1978, pp. 114-5, 229b-c, fig. 138, dated to c. 1536. M. di Giampaolo, Girolamo Bedoli 1500-1569, Florence, 1997, no. 40, pp. 137-8, illustrated. The Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner, London and New York, 1996, III, p. 487, entry by David Ekserdjian.
Provenance
The Aldobrandini Collection, Rome, until purchased by Pietro Camuccini (1760-1833) and Vicenzo Camuccini (1771-1844), Rome, probably in 1797, as Scarsellino, and by descent to Giovanni Battista Camuccini, who sold the collection to Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland (1793-1865) in 1865, and by descent at Alnwick Castle, until purchased by Professor Richard Wollheim (1923-2003) in 1953, and by descent to the present owners.
Notes
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF THE LATE PROFESSOR RICHARD WOLLHEIM (LOT 69)
The earliest secure records concering the present painting, when it was in the collection of the painter Vincenzo Camuccini and his dealer brother Pietro, suggest that it came from the celebrated Aldobrandini Collection, from which they certainly acquired a number of items in 1797; although it has not yet proved possible to link it securely with any specific picture in an earlier Aldobrandini inventory. In the Camuccini Collection it was attributed to the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Ferrarese painter Ippolito Scarsella, commonly known as Scarsellino (c. 1550-1620), an ascription it retained when it passed to the collection of the Dukes of Northumberland at Alnwick in 1856 in the company of a whole variety of important pictures, of which Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks (National Gallery, London) is now the best known. It was in 1953, when it was acquired by the eminent philosopher and aesthetician, Professor Richard Wollheim (see below), that the name of an artist born half a century earlier than Scarsellino, Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli, was first proposed by Phillip Pouncey, and it has since gone on to establish itself as one of Bedoli's most admired portraits, not least by virtue of its inclusion in the exhibition 'The Age of Correggio and Carracci', which was held jointly by the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1986-87.
Bedoli was the cousin by marriage of Parmigianino, and doubtless sought to associate himself with his famous relative by adopting his surname (Mazzola). His style is also closely related to Parmigianino's, and the authorship of some works remains disputed between them, but it is important to stress that Bedoli is a highly distinctive and independent artistic personality. This is arguably particularly apparent in the context of portraiture, at which both artists excelled. The idea of including a foreground still-life or other appurtenances related to the life and concerns of the sitter is already in Parmigianino's early Portrait of a Collector of around 1523 in the National Gallery, London, but is treated very differently here. For whereas Parmigianino creates an almost claustraphobic sense of his sitter hemmed in by his possessions, an idea which is found in Bedoli's Portrait of Bartolomeo Prati (Galleria Nazionale, Parma; see G. Bertini, 'Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli's Portrait of Bartolomeo Prati identified', Apollo, June 2002, CLV, no. 4, pp. 37-9), here Bedoli reduces them to a bare minimum, and clearly intends the combination of an hourglass - an age-old symbol of mortality - and a book to suggest themes of reflection on a passage of time.
In the same vein, he is at pains to avoid the intensely emotional confrontational gaze Parmigianino tended to favour, and instead shows his unidentified sitter looking reflectively away to one side, very much in the manner of his Portrait of a Domenican Friar as Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Brera, Milan (Di Giampaolo, op. cit., no. 43 pp. 139-40). Another revealing comparison is with Bedoli's Saint Clare in Capodimonte, Naples (ibid., no. 17, pp. 124 and 60, illustrated in colour), which is generally placed in the 1540s. There the sitter does meet our gaze, but is set against a very comparable chocolate brown neutral backdrop, which allows all attention to be concentrated on the figure, and the handling of such elements as the corrugated drapery of the sleeve is compellingly similar. The chronology of Bedoli's portraits is far from clear, and it has tended to be argued that the present portrait may date from the 1550s, which would place it close to such works as Parma Embracing Alessandro Farnese (ibid., no. 45, pp. 141 and 111, illustrated in colour) of around 1555-6. However, since its revelatory recent cleaning, which has underlined its excellent state of preservation and allows its exquisitely subtle if muted colour harmonies to be appreciated fully, a dating to the previous decade alongside the Saint Clare seems far more plausible.
David Ekserdjian
The picture's distinguished provenance continued into the twentieth century, for in 1953 it was purchased by Professor Richard Wollheim (1923-2003), one of Britain's most distinguished post-war philosophers (fig. 1). His work confronted issues that were central to the visual arts, a subject that was of the upmost importance to him; his contribution in this area were far more wide-ranging and more heartfelt than many other philosophers working in the field of aesthetics.
Among his many publications, the two books that arguably made the greatest impact in redefining his subject were Art and its Objects (1968), and Painting as an Art (1987). In these seminal texts he applied a profound understanding of psychoanalysis to the treatment of aesthetic issues. His love of painting is evident throughout these works and his method was always to elucidate a work of art rather than to fit it into a particular theoretical framework. He once described his own, slightly idiosyncratic method of looking at pictures: 'I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture because I was looking at it.'
Over the course of a highly distinguished teaching career he was appointed Grote Professor of mind and logic at University College, London, in 1963, a post he held until 1982. He then moved to America where he became Professor of Philosophy, first at Colombia University from 1982-5, and then at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1985 until his death. During this remarkable academic career he continued his lifelong fascination with art, certainly as a philosopher, but also as a critic and a collector. He wrote widely on artists that he admired, from Poussin and Bellini to Manet and de Kooning. The identification of the sitter in the present work as a philosopher, must surely have given the picture a special significance for him.
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