Leseprobe

55 Crowe and Cavalcaselle euphemistically state that: “The original beauty of the painting tempted people to attach a name to the person shown” seeing that Guarienti, painter, restorer, dealer and curator in one person, seemed to have been taken in by a retrospec- tive written valorization of an unknown portrayed person – if he had not provided it himself. 17 It was similar with a painting of a man in the Dresden Pic- ture Gallery that was formerly attributed to Giorgione and today to Paris Bordone and whose inscription presented the portrayed person as Aretino. 18 The newly revealed inscription indicated that the man in the painting had been born in the year 1515 which contradicted with the actual year of Aretino’s birth. 19 While Crowe and Cavalcaselle made no attempt to classify the box and spatula in the middle ground, Giovanni Morelli noted the following in 1880: “A box of paint can be seen on the windowsill behind the man.” 20 However, in 1901, Karl Tscheuschner pro- tested against the assumption that it showed a paint- er’s equipment and was therefore a portrait of an artist that had existed since that time. He was correct in his observation that the spoon-shaped spatula could not have been used to apply paint to the sur- face of the picture like a modern flat spatula but re- sembled a pharmacist’s powder spatula. 21 The “powder box” also seemed to be more of an indication that the portrayed person was active in the medical or pharmacy profession. 22 We know of rec- tangular and round medicine boxes and spice tins with cavities and lids, as well as spoon-like spatulas, from the early modern age. 23 The boxes were usually used by spice merchants and apothecaries to display the wares they were trying to market to their clients. They are therefore the attributes of the two doctor Saints Cosmas and Damian. 24 One recognizes a box and spatula similar to the objects in Titian’s portrait of a gentleman as attributes of the saints in an “As- sunta” by the Tintoretto workshop from the 1570s in the Venetian Church of San Polo. 25 Crowe and Cavalcaselle were the first to believe that they had noticed an old overpainting that had been cleaned away and would explain the later addi- tion of the palm leaf: “Around the head, now only shining indistinctly beneath the overpainted ground, one sees the line of a round nimbus.” 26 The transfor- mation of worldly portraits into those of saints could seem to be absolutely plausible not only on account of the practice of sacred identification portraits, but also those repaintings that were sometimes under- taken to upgrade unknown portrayed persons to saints. 27 At the time, the Dresden Picture Gallery also had a portrait of a young man, attributed to Parmi- gianino, who had later been decked out with a halo, palm and stones to become Saint Stephen. 28 Tscheuschner though that his belief that he could see traces of an aureole had been confirmed when the painting was analyzed in the restoration work- shop of the Dresden Gallery; he reinterpreted the work as the portrait of a doctor or apothecary “who had been portrayed by Titian as a saint of his profes- sion” – as Cosmas or Damien. 29 However, art-techno- logical investigations carried out in 1967 ruled out that a halo had been eliminated. 30 It seemed much more likely that they were traces of intensive painting work on the head of the portrayed person carried out by the artist himself around which the rest of the painting was created with rapid brushstrokes. Tscheuschner’s theory met with opposition in 1905 when Herbert Cook argued that the palm leaf – palma in Italian – in the hand of the man, together with the “paint box” must have been an allusion to the family name and profession of the little known artist Anto- nio Palma, the nephew of Jacopo Il Vecchio and father of the Giovane whose year of birth was probably 1515. 31 Karl Woerlmann concurred with this identifi- cation in his official gallery inventory in 1908 and the painting has been considered a portrait of Palma to this day. 32 However, more recent research sometimes adds a question mark to the name seeing that no ver- ified portrait of Palma that could be used as a com- parison has been preserved and his birthdate is also uncertain. 33 In turn, the incorrect identification of the male portrait in Dresden with Palma has led to his birthdate now being erroneously given as 1515. 34 Alvise dalla Scala, Deacon of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco The infrared reflectographic examination of Titian’s male portrait, performed together with Christoph Schölzel in 1994, revealed the following inscription (ill. 5): M·D·LXI· Anno . sví . vardíanatvs ætatís . suæ . xlvi. Titíanvs píctor et æqves cæsaris.