Leseprobe

52 connoisseur Marcantino Michiel inspected in the year 1525: There was an important collection of paintings in the house of the diplomat Girolamo Marcello in San Tomà that also included a portrait of Girolamo’s brother Cristoforo, the Archbishop of Corfu, by Titian. 5 It seems unlikely that the painting being discussed could have immortalized a later member of the Mar- cello family as the descendants would have hardly been prepared to hand over such an impressive visual documentation of their noble origin. This portrait of a man was moved to another, more important, pilaster in the Inner Gallery where it hung opposite Veronese’s “Madonna with the Cuccina Family” and Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna”, which had been recently purchased, from 1754 to 1771. 6 In the first two catalogs of the Dresden gallery, published in 1765 and 1771, the painting is still listed as the “Portrait of Petrus Aretinus with Bare Head and Tile Beard, Dressed in Black, and with a Palm Leaf in his Hand”. 7 Incidentally, the portrait must have stood in a competitive relationship with the supposed portrait of Aretino by Titian that Matthias Oesterreich, the former inspector of the Dresden Gallery who had “de- fected” and entered into Prussian service, cataloged in Sans Souci in 1764 where it adorned the Italian wall of the royal painting gallery and was reproduced as a copperplate engraving in 1766. 8 As the Neue Sach- und Ortsverzeichnis of 1817 shows, Titian’s male portrait in the Dresden gallery received even more attention at the beginning of the 19 th century. 9 Not only was the signature and year of its creation “MDLXI” mentioned, but also the painted inscription “Inm. Petrus Aretinus, aetatis sua XXXXVI” that established the identification of the portrayed person at the time. Seeing that Aretino had died in 1556, the portrait of the forty six year old poet, which was dated with 1561, could have only been painted in memoriam (“INM.”), meaning post mortem – if at all. The wall sections described in the 1826 catalog (ill. 3) and the only known view of the interior of the Dresden gallery (ill. 4) show that Titian’s male portrait was presented at the viewer’s eye level in the flight of rooms in the west wing of the Inner Gallery until around 1830. 10 Hung together with Titian’s “Lady in White” and “Young Woman with a Vase” (ill. p. 21), which was attributed to him at the time, Fasolo’s “Lady”, who has now been identified as Maria de’ Medici, a portrait of a doge by Leandro Bassano, and – first and foremost – Veronese’s male portrait that was thought to show the face of the art connoisseur Daniele Barbaro (ill. p. 6), Titian’s “Aretino” took its Ill. 2 Digital reconstruction of the hanging of Titian’s “Portrait of the Pigment Merchant Alvise dalla Scala” in the Inner Gallery of the Dresden Picture Gallery in 1750 (Visualized with Gallery Creator)