Portrait of a Man in Armor with Two Pages

Portrait of a Man in Armor with Two Pages

Portrait of a Man in Armor with Two Pages
Artist:Paris Bordon (Italian, Treviso 1500–1571 Venice)
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:46 x 62 in. (116.8 x 157.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1973
Accession Number:1973.311.1

This painting shows a high-ranking officer with two pages, one of whom, an African, holds his helmet while the other fastens the armor on his right arm. It belongs to a long history of portraits of military men in armor, but the extensive landscape background, with stormy skies over the advancing armies, and the mood of melancholy are unique to Bordon. Although we do not know the identity of the sitter, who may have been Milanese, this work was much esteemed in the seventeenth century, when it was sold to Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in Florence.
Catalogue Entry
This picture may be the portrait by Paris Bordon that belonged to Bernardo Trincavalla, an art collector who was granted Venetian citizenship in 1629. Trincavalla’s painting was described by Carlo Ridolfi in 1648 as a “knight whose page fastens his armor.” Ridolfi does not mention the second page, but then neither do several modern writers who have described the picture. The work belonged subsequently to Paolo del Sera, a Florentine painter-dealer who resided in Venice from 1640 until his death in 1672. Marco Boschini described it in 1660 as a portrait of a general armed by two pages, one of them a "moor who proffers his helmet." Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici acquired the painting from del Sera; how it later made its way to England, where it was recorded in the nineteenth century, remains a mystery.
Bordon’s depiction belongs to the genre of military portraiture that was popular in Europe from the time of the Roman Empire until the nineteenth century. From ninth-century portraits of Charlemagne to Sir Thomas Lawrence’s likeness of George IV (Pinacoteca Vaticana), great rulers were often represented as military heroes. The full-length standing portrait of Philip II, now in the Prado, which Titian painted in 1551, is one of the most magnificent; it was later adapted by Rubens, Van Dyck, and many other artists. A less formal format, showing the sitter preparing for battle, was also developed in Venice during the sixteenth century, and it is with this type that the present portrait is most closely associated. In such examples, an officer looks over his shoulder as a page adjusts his suit of armor; the format seems to have originated with an early sixteenth-century prototype known only from numerous replicas. One of the replicas of this composition, formerly in the Orléans collection, was catalogued in the eighteenth century as a portrait of Gaston de Foix by Giorgione; yet the true prototype may well have been an early work by Titian, as Roberto Longhi (Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, Florence, 1946, p. 64) and others have suggested. The action of the page and the gaze of the officer endow this portrait type with an informality and psychological intimacy that rarely appear in conventional military portrayals.
Enlarging the format of the Giorgionesque composition and making it more complex, Bordon has added the landscape and introduced the second page holding the helmet. A suggestion (Fahy 1973) that the portrait depicts Carlo da Rho (d. 1553) must be abandoned, as da Rho did not have a military career. The style of the portrait, however, is typical of the work Bordon undertook in 1549–50, when he resided in da Rho’s palace in Milan. The horizontal format, with three-quarter-length figures standing before undulating hills, is also seen in Bordon’s Holy Family with Saint Catherine in the Brera, which dates from about 1550. Tintoretto’s portrait of Scipione Clusone (Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genoa), dated 1561, seems to have been inspired by the present painting (Rossi 1984).
[2011; adapted from Fahy 2005]

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