Leseprobe

54 While Martin Bernhard Lindau and Julius Hübner merely put a question mark behind the portrait of the “licentious poet”, Johann Gottlob von Quandt consid- ered Titian’s portrait “most peculiar”: It was unlike other portraits of Aretino; the Christian victory palm of martyrdom was “not a suitable attribute for the lascivious poet or the feared satirist” and the inscrip- tion was probably forged. 14 In spite of these obvious doubts, Wilhelm Schäfer stuck with the traditional identification in 1860 by referring to the older printed reproductions although they showed completely dif- ferent portraits of Aretino. He went as far as to inter- pret the palm leaf as a symbol of self-glorification on the part of the immoral writer who saw himself as persecuted and martyred by the moralists. 15 An unknown pharmacist or the artist Antonio Palma? It was not until 1877 that Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle rejected – once and for all – the traditional identification of the man shown as Aretino on grounds of the lack of any physiogno- mic similarity. They also reported on a recent clean- ing that – as Quandt had previously suspected – ex- posed the second and third lines of the inscription as a forgery that had probably been undertaken after 1867 to counter the doubts that had arisen about the identity of the man in the painting. 16 An older inscrip- tion had come to light beneath this one but the dif- ference in color and graphology showed that this was also not original: mdlxi anno .. i. ap .. a. natvs ætatis svae xlvi titianvs pictor et æqves cæsaris. Ill. 4 Anonymous “View of the Inner Gallery of the Dresden Picture Gallery”, 1830 Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich Kabinett