Trident and Oar in Bronzino's Portrait of Andrea Doria
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Trident and Oar in Bronzino’s Portrait of Andrea Doria JOSEPH ELIAV, Tel Aviv University / University of Haifa Previously unpublished X-ray images prove that in the portrait commissioned for Giovio’s museum, Bronzino painted Andrea Doria holding an oar, not a trident. The article interprets the portrait in its original form. Examination of the portrait together with the eulogy Giovio attached to it shows that Doria is painted as Odysseus, not as Neptune, and explains the incongruous oar. Erotic insin- uations in the portrait suggest that, like Bronzino’s burlesque poetry, it has a hidden meaning. Further analysis in the context of Giovio’s historiography and a precise dating unveil a meaning that criticizes Doria’s incompetence in a recent crucial naval battle. INTRODUCTION IN THE ALLEGORICAL portrait of Andrea Doria (1466–1560) by Agnolo di Cosimo, known as Bronzino (1503–72), the Genovese admiral is standing in the nude onboard a ship holding a trident; he is obviously in the guise of the god of the sea and therefore the painting, now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, is appropriately known as Portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune (fig. 1). However, according to a hypothesis accepted with no contention in the research literature, Bronzino painted Doria holding an oar and the trident is a modification effected at a later time;1 and yet, interpretations of the portrait refer mainly to its present form, whereas attempts to understand it in the original form, with the oar, are tentative and inconclusive. The oar hypothesis has, up until now, rested on indirect evidence that is plausible but open to doubt and based on the report of a visual observation that will be shown here to be a simple mistake; and yet the hypothesis is correct in spite of the weak evidence. Previously unpublished X-ray and IR images from the archives of the Pinacoteca di Brera prove that Bronzino indeed painted Doria holding an oar. With the oar a proven fact and no longer a hypothesis, the main objective is to understand the painting in its original form. As 1 For an overview of the painting, see Brock, 178–82; Costamagna, 2010. Renaissance Quarterly 73 (2020): 775–820 © The Author(s) 2020. Published by the Renaissance Society of America. doi: 10.1017/rqx.2020.119 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 26 Sep 2021 at 06:55:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 776RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIII, NO. 3 Figure 1. Agnolo Bronzino. Portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune, ca. 1532–45. Oil on canvas, 115 x 83 cm. Courtesy of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. currently displayed in the Brera the portrait is self-explanatory, but because the oar is an entirely inadequate attribute both for Neptune and for the person pre- sumably portrayed in his guise, this painting in its original form eludes interpretation. Bronzino painted this portrait for Paolo Giovio’s (1483–1552) museum of illustrious persons, where each person was represented by a portrait and a text, a sort of long caption, attached to the wall beneath it. Analysis of Doria’s portrait together with the text that Giovio attached to it explains the meaning of the oar and presents a new interpretation of the painting, but that is only an outer layer. FurtheranalysisofthecombinedexhibitinthewidercontextofBronzino’s poetry and Giovio’s historical writing reveals that the portrait has an inner layer as well, that it conveys censure disguised as praise. Examination of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 26 Sep 2021 at 06:55:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. BRONZINO’S PORTRAIT OF ANDREA DORIA 777 circumstances and timing of the portrait’s commission leads to the motives for its dual meaning. THE PROTAGONISTS Andrea Doria was more than seventy years old and the foremost naval com- mander on the Christian side of the ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean when Bronzino painted his portrait. At the age of fifty, after some thirty years of service as a mercenary and with no naval expe- rience, Doria had acquired a small private fleet of warships and embarked on a new career as a naval condottiere (mercenary contractor).2 In a few years his fleet grew to become the fourth largest in the Mediterranean; only the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Republic of Venice had larger fleets. Doria offered the services of his fleet and his own services as admiral to the highest bidder. In that capacity he served alternately King Francis I of France (r. 1515– 47) and Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–34) against their common enemy, Emperor Charles V (r. 1519–54). In 1528, soon after the Sack of Rome by imperial troops, Doria switched sides to become chief admiral of the emperor’s Mediterranean navy. In his new status Doria advanced, so to speak, from involvement in skir- mishes among Christian powers over control of pieces of Italy to the forefront of the conflict between the two major powers of his time, the Habsburg Empire under Charles V and the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66). His counterpart on the Ottoman side was Khair ad-Din, known as Barbarossa (1478–1546).3 In 1535 Doria commanded the emperor’snavyin the campaign against Khair ad-Din in Tunis. On land, the emperor’s army con- quered Tunis and therefore the operation was acclaimed as a success, but it was a short-lived and inconsequential one. At sea Khair ad-Din outsmarted Doria and retreated with his entire fleet intact. Doria was again in command of the fleet in the emperor’s disastrous attempt to conquer Algiers in 1541. In between these campaigns, in 1538 at Preveza in Greece, Doria was personally responsible for a shameful and very consequential defeat of a joint Christian fleet under his com- mand by a significantly smaller and weaker fleet under Khair ad-Din. This battle will be discussed in more detail below. Acclaimed as a great admiral despite the defeats he had suffered at the hands of Khair ad-Din, with hardly a significant success in the balance, Doria continued to lead the imperial navy in military oper- ations until he was well into his eighties. When he painted Doria’s portrait, Bronzino was at the beginning of a long career as court painter for Cosimo I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany 2 Arnolfini, 40–41. 3 Graviere, 193–97. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 26 Sep 2021 at 06:55:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 778RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIII, NO. 3 (r. 1537–74). Bronzino was a prolific and accomplished portraitist, with a style that combined meticulous attention to detail with a tension between an almost tangible presence and a sense of detachment.4 Cosimo employed other painters as well, but Bronzino was the official and exclusive portrait painter in court; he painted several well-known portraits of the duke, the duchess, and their children, as well as portraits for other patrons. The Doria is one of only two portraits in Bronzino’s oeuvre that show the sitters in the guise of mythological figures.5 Vasari writes that Bronzino “made the portrait of Andrea Doria for Monsignor Giovio, his friend.”6 Paolo Giovio was a physician, a bishop, a writer, a historian, and a statesman who served Cardinal Giulio de Medici, laterPopeClementVII,aspersonalphysician and political advisor. In that capacity Giovio took part in his patron’s ill-fated political maneuvers that cul- minated in the Sack of Rome in 1527 and was at the side of the desolate pope when he took refuge in Castel Sant’Angelo. After the death of Clement VII, Giovio found new patrons in Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89) and his grandfather, Pope Paul III (r. 1534–49). An adamant advocate of concerted military action against the Ottoman Empire, Giovio was involved in the efforts to organize a Christian alliance. In 1537 he was in the pope’s entourage during the negotiations with the emperor that led to the establishment of the Holy League, the effort that came to a shameful end with Doria’s defeat at Preveza the next year. Because he did not support the pope’s Counter-Reformation pol- icies and refused to take part in the Council of Trent, Giovio left the papal court and found a new patron in Duke Cosimo I.7 Giovio wrote many books on widely diverse subjects, his magnum opus being the Historiae sui Temporis (History of his time, 1550–52); and yet, at least according to his biographer T. C. Price Zimmermann, “Giovio’s idea of founding a portrait museum . was his most original contribution to European culture.”8 The portrait of Andrea Doria was commissioned for that museum. The museum of illustrious persons in Giovio’s villa on the shore of Lake Como was the enterprise of a historian, not of an art collector: the exhibits were not paintings but persons, men of letters, rulers, and military leaders that in Giovio’s judgment had attained renown or notoriety. Each exhibit in the museum consisted of a portrait and of a text, or eulogy, as Giovio referred to it, attached to the wall below the painting. Together they presented the per- sonality and the deeds, often also the misdeeds, of its subject, not just his 4 Brock, 61. 5 The other is Cosimo I as Orpheus (1537), in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 6 Vasari, 7:595: “A monsignor Giovio, amico suo, [fece] il ritratto d’Andrea Doria.” 7 Zimmermann, 2001, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, s.v.