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| Carlo Rimbotti (1518–1591) |
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| Reverse of panel (2016, enhanced) |
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| X-ray fluorescence mapping analysis for lead distribution |
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| Tracing outlines showing figure underneath painted surface as revealed by XRF (Michael Gallagher) |
Artist:Francesco Salviati (Francesco de' Rossi) (Italian, Florence 1510–1563 Rome)
Date:1548
Medium:Oil on wood
Dimensions:20 3/4 × 16 3/8 in. (52.5 × 41.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, Walter and Leonore Annenberg Acquisitions Endowment Fund, Alejandro Santo Domingo, Ronald S. Lauder, and The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund Gifts, and Beatrice Stern, Annette de la Renta, Brownstein Family Foundation, and David and Julia Tobey Gifts, 2017
Accession Number:2017.401
Salviati painted the Florentine medical doctor Carlo Rimbotti when both men belonged to the literary society, the Accademia Fiorentina. The vivid quality of psychological presence suggests that this was an informal portrait for a friend. The precise observation—note the moles on Rimbotti’s brow and forehead—is in contrast with the formality and artifice of Bronzino’s portrait that hangs nearby. There, the young man is psychologically distant and surrounded by objects that allude to his status and interests. Most contemporary portraits followed Bronzino’s lead. Salviati’s is a rare attempt to encourage the viewer to draw close to this remarkable sitter.
Catalogue Entry
The Artist: A major figure of sixteenth-century painting, Francesco de’ Rossi, better known as Francesco Salviati, was born in Florence in 1510. He was a close contemporary of Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572). The painter-biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), who trained alongside him, considered him a close friend and wrote an extensive biography that remains our primary source of information. For Vasari, Salviati represented an almost ideal painter, talented and knowledgeable of the most important artistic developments of his time. He remarked that Salviati had "la piu bella maniera" (the most beautiful manner) of any artist in the city and recorded that his reputation as a painter of inventive, monumental narrative scenes was unsurpassed.
The young Cecchino de’ Rossi studied with a series of Florentine artists, including Andrea del Sarto, and in 1531 he left Florence for Rome. There, Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, from whom he took his professional name, supported him. The young artist was impressed by Classical antiquity, the monumental paintings of Raphael and his school, and the Roman works of Michelangelo, and before leaving the city he created one masterpiece, a fresco of the Visitation (1538, Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato). At the end of the decade, he traveled and worked extensively in northern Italy, especially in Venice and Bologna. He received important commissions in both cities, and in turn was open to the pictorial qualities of Venetian painting, and, especially, the works Parmigianino (1503–1540) that he viewed in Bologna.
Cardinal Salviati’s brother, Alamanno Salviati, invited the artist to return to Florence in 1543 to work for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Once there, there he undertook the commission of a cycle of monumental frescoes depicting the life of the Roman commander Furius Camillus in the Sala dell’ Udienza (Audience Chamber) of the Palazzo Vecchio. It was during this period, one of the highpoints of his career, that Salviati painted The Met’s portrait of Carlo Rimbotti as well as the remarkable Three Fates (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) that also belonged to the Rimbotti family. Vasari’s lengthy description of the frescoes in his Life of the artist, which focused on the skill with which Salviati conjured up the ancient world and the grace with which figures, animals, and ornament were depicted, give us some sense of the impact they made when unveiled (see Vasari, trans. de Vere, 1912/1996, vol. 2, pp. 566–68). Salviati painted portraits throughout his career, and in Florence he undertook portraits both for the ruling family and for people that he knew well, including those of a goldsmith and a furrier. However, the attribution of portraits to Salviati has remained one of the most complex and vexing issues surrounding his oeuvre.
Salviati returned to Rome in late 1548 and, except for brief stays in France, Milan, and Florence in the mid-1550s, settled there and continued to carry out major commissions for altarpieces and frescoes for the most significant ecclesiastical patrons. These cemented his reputation as the greatest creator of painted narratives active in the city. His cycle of frescoes in a chapel in the German national church of Santa Maria dell’Anima is a landmark of late Mannerist painting in an innovative, antiquarian style. Thanks to his close relationship with his biographer, we know that Salviati had a melancholic and difficult personality (Vasari calls him "melancholy, abstinent, sickly, and cross-grained"), which made it difficult for him to participate in the social world of his fellow artists but drove him to work continuously and with intense concentration. Salviati died in 1563, and in summing up his achievement Vasari said that he excelled at invention, in the creation of "ornament," in his bold use of color, in his craftsmanship, in his understanding of the nude, and in the manner in which he "gave great beauty and grace to every kind of head." (Vasari, de Vere, vol. 2, pp. 580–81).
The Painting: Discovered only in 2016, this painting is a touchstone of Salviati’s achievement as a portraitist. Contemporary inscriptions and red wax seals on the reverse of the intact panel (see fig. 1 above, and Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings) establish that the painting depicts the Florentine medical doctor Carlo Rimbotti (1518–1591) at the age of thirty in 1548. One of the wax seals is impressed with the Rimbotti coat of arms (gold with three bands of azure, as in Il libro d’oro della Toscana). The inscriptions—whose legibility is enhanced under UV light—identify the artist twice; that in the lower right, written in block letters, asserts in Latin that he is "Francesco, the protégé of Cardinal Salviati." Gesso drips along the edges provide evidence that the panel is intact and has not been cut down.
Salviati depicted Rimbotti almost half-length, with his body at a slight angle and his head in three-quarter view. He is hatless, and the artist has paid close attention to his compelling features, such as his light eyes, and the two moles on his brow and forehead. He wears a dark doublet over a white camicia with a thin ruff collar. The book he holds in his right hand has the red binding with thin gold ornament and ribbon tie that are characteristic of Italian books of the first half of the century, and, given Rimbotti’s interests is likely to be a small volume of the poems of Petrarch, or a Petrarchino. The viewer senses the psychological presence of the sitter; this combined with the relative informality of the image suggests that artist and sitter were well acquainted (see below). While many of the portraits attributed to Salviati show the sitter at a formal distance and surrounded by accoutrements that suggest his or her status, here instead the artist has brought Rimbotti close to us, cropping the edges of his head and proper right hand. In its vivid directness and painterly quality, the head seems most closely allied with the portraits included in the fresco of The Triumph of Furius Camillus, above all the self-portrait that Vasari tells us the artist included (Vasari, de Vere, vol. 2, p. 567), painted in 1543–45.
The Sitter and his Family: Carlo Rimbotti was a politically and socially ambitious medical doctor from a well-established family (on his biography, see Fabbri 2005, pp. 35–40). He studied at the University of Bologna, where he received the title of doctor of arts and medicine. The 1540s were a critical decade for him: in 1543, he was emancipated from his father and almost immediately matriculated as a doctor into his professional organization, the Arte dei medici e speziali. He rose to the highest rank there over the next decades, while also beginning to hold an important series of political positions, rising equally quickly through positions in the Florentine government, and ensuring roles for his three sons as well. During the 1540s, he lived in the family’s old home, but after his mother’s death in 1554 he bought an important property, near the Duomo, that had been developed by the Del Palagio family, in part as early as the fourteenth century.
Perhaps most relevantly, Rimbotti became a member of the prestigious literary academy, the Accademia Fiorentina in 1541, a year following its founding. Salviati joined him there in 1545, and this may have been the arena in which they met. That same year the publisher Anton Francesco Doni joined the Accademia as well, and Salviati produced portrait designs for books he was publishing, as well as frontispieces for his Lettioni d’Accademici Fiorentini sopra Dante. Libro primo and Prose antiche di Dante, Petrarcha, et Boccaccio et di molti altri nobili et virtuosi ingegni nuovamente raccolte (both 1547) (see Alessandro Cecchi in Francesco Salviati (1510–1563) o la Bella Maniera, ed. Catherine Monbeig Goguel. Exh. cat., Villa Medici, Rome. Milan, 1998, p. 72). Salviati’s depiction of Rimbotti holding the small, precious book is another indication of the Accademia’s impact on these men, and of the interests that brought them together.
When Carlo died in 1591, two of his three sons were living. It is possible that his eldest, Giovambattista (1550–1624), inherited Salviati’s The Three Fates (Galleria Palatina, Florence), mentioned above. He bequeathed it to his son Rimbotto Rimbotti (1593–1664), a Cavaliere of the Order of Santo Stefano, in whose collection it was noted the year following his death (see Catherine Monbeig Goguel in Francesco Salviati (1510–1563) o la Bella Maniera,1998, pp. 204–5). Carlo's second son, Tommaso (1565–1622), instead inherited Carlo’s portrait. Tommaso was an ecclesiastic who was also an accomplished poet in his early life, and in his will, we learn that the painting had remained in the family home and was also left to Rimbotto, his nephew (Fabbri 2005, p. 40 n. 174). Rimbotto Rimbotti was himself an active collector, mentioned in several passages in Filippo Baldinucci’s Notizie de’ professori del disegno (first volume published 1681) for his collections of drawings and paintings (1846/1974, vol. 3, pp. 16, 280–82; vol. 6, pp. 436–37). It is likely that the painting passed at his death to his heir Alesso (1632–1699). After that we lose trace of the work.
Technical examination of the picture with X-ray fluorescence (XRF) mapping analysis has revealed that Rimbotti’s portrait was painted over another of a different sitter (see Technical Notes and figs. 2–3). The facial features of this first figure were positioned lower on the panel, and the sitter was beardless, with a smooth, round jaw. The figure had sloping shoulders, a different collar, and either a cap with an elaborate silhouette or a braid. It is difficult to tell whether this initial sitter was male or female. This image was completely suppressed by the subsequent depiction of Rimbotti.
Andrea Bayer 2017
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