Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84408-6 — The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy Monika Schmitter Excerpt More Information INTRODUCTION HEN CHARLES II WAS restored to the English throne in 1660, after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the end of the W English Interregnum, the States of Holland and West Friesland sent the new monarch valuable presents in hopes of securing his favor. Having ascertained that Charles, like his father before him, was partial to Italian pictures and ancient statuary, the Dutch assembled a collection of twenty-eight paintings and twelve sculptures, which together with a luxurious yacht named Mary comprised the so-called “Dutch Gift.” Although the sovereign “thanked them for so worthy a Present, and express’d his willingness to enter into a neerer Alliance with them,” the tribute did little to preserve peace1 between the two maritime powers, who were back at war several years later. Among the paintings shipped from Rotterdam to London in October 1660 was a sixteenth-century Italian portrait depicting a man surrounded by antique statuary and other collectible items (Fig. 1). Soon thereafter, the painting was hanging in the “Green Chamber next to the Bed chamber” at Whitehall. The inventory reads: “Lorenzo Lottie. A man sitting and holding a small head in one 2 Hand w[i]th severall statues by Him. He being an Antiquery.” Although the painting came to England properly attributed (it is in fact signed and dated), whether accidentally or willfully, within about twenty years the artist’s name was obscured. By about 1687 it was said to be a self-portrait by Giorgione; not long after an attribution was made to Correggio, which endured 3 until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84408-6 — The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy Monika Schmitter Excerpt More Information 2 INTRODUCTION Fig. 1 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527, Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. centuries, both Giorgione and Correggio were descriptions of works of art in public locations and much better known than Lorenzo Lotto, who private collections in the aforementioned Italian had been more or less forgotten after his death. cities. Although the author of these notes had As doubts about the attribution began to mount, been identified within twenty years of their publica- a crucial turning point came in 1858 when Charles tion as the Venetian nobleman Marcantonio Eastlake (1793–1865), the first director of the Michiel (1484–1552), for complex reasons it took National Gallery, London, sent Richard Redgrave a long time for this to be recognized, and as a result (1804–88), Surveyor of the Queen’sPictures, even today this fundamental resource is still occa- 5 a quotation from a text then known as the sionally referred to as “the Anonimo.” 4 “Anonimo” or the “Anonimo Morelliano.” This The passage from Michiel’s notebook that one-of-a-kind manuscript had been discovered in Eastlake sent to Redgrave reads: “Works in Venice by the director of the Marciana Library, Venice ... in the House of Messer Andrea Jacopo Morelli (1745–1819), who published it in Odoni, 1532 ... in the bedroom upstairs ... 1800 under the title Notizia d’opere di disegno nella the portrait of Messer Andrea himself, half- prima metà del secolo XVI esistenti in Padova, length, in oil, who contemplates ancient marble 6 Cremona,Milano,Pavia,Bergamo,CremaeVenezia fragments was by the hand of Lorenzo Lotto.” scrittadaunanonimodiqueltempo. Composed Under Eastlake’s supervision the painting was between ca. 1521 and 1543, the manuscript com- restored in 1863, at which point the signature prises approximately one hundred folios with “Lorenzo Lotto/1527” was discovered in the © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84408-6 — The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy Monika Schmitter Excerpt More Information INTRODUCTION 3 lower left quadrant of the painting (see Fig. his lifetime, the ensemble did not last long. The 7 131). This felicitous conjunction produced not works of art it contained were dispersed by the only the correct attribution and date, but also the end of the seventeenth century, if not earlier, and identification of the sitter, the painting’s proven- the house itself was transformed beyond recogni- ance, and even its original placement. tion in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the This book is only possible due to that coinci- extraordinary confluence of sources (there are dence: that Lotto signed and dated the painting, several others that will be discussed later) allows that Michiel was in the habit of writing fairly me to piece together and imagine the contents detailed descriptions of what he saw when he and decoration of his home, and as a result, to went to people’s houses, and crucially, that when explore Odoni’s identity through his possessions. he visited Odoni’sresidence,contrarytohisusual The detail provided in the documents and com- practice, he recorded in what rooms he saw particu- parison with similar works of art and architecture lar works of art. Two further documents create that do survive, along with the few extant works almost an embarrassment of riches for a scholar owned by Odoni, especially the portrait, provide working on early sixteenth-century art: an inventory rich materials from which to draw my own “por- oftheOdonihousemadein1555,whichisalso trait of Andrea Odoni.” organized by room and is in some aspects more The study of Odoni’s life, house, and collection complete than Michiel’s notes, and a letter by the also enables me to examine Lotto’scompelling famous writer Pietro Aretino addressed to Andrea portrait with new eyes. The painting is far from Odoni (dated 1538). being a straightforward “portrait of a collector”– In this letter Aretino compliments Odoni’scol- in fact, as scholars have long known, the objects in it lecting practices, creating a remarkable synchronism bear little relation to Odoni’s actual possessions. with both Michiel’s notes and Lotto’s portrait. Instead, the portrait presents an imaginary collec- Aretino’s description of the house begins: “But tion, concocted by artist and patron together to whoever wishes to see how clean and candid his depict collecting as a means of transmuting the [Odoni’s] spirit is should look at his face and his self, of transforming a variety of material things house, look at them, I say, and you will see as much into “higher gold.” My interpretation of the portrait serenity and beauty as one can desire in a house and demonstrates how both men conceived the power 8 in a face.” The writer’scontentionthatOdoni’s of objects to form the self. house was essentially a portrait of its owner, Exactly when the painting left the Odoni aparalleltoLotto’s actual likeness, is the launching household is not known. A copy of the head point for this book. The association between and bust alone was likely made for the family Odoni, his house, his collection, and his portrait in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century also figures in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.In in order to preserve their ancestor’s likeness when 11 the edition of 1568, Vasari not only recorded the they sold his portrait. By about 1622, the original portrait by Lotto but also gave an extended descrip- was probably already in the collection of the Dutch tion of the frescoes by Girolamo da Treviso on the merchant Lucas van Uffelen, who lived in Venice 9 façade. But most revealing is the very short state- from 1616 to the early 1630s. Uffelen’s portrait by ment he included only in the 1550 edition: Anthony van Dyck, dated ca. 1622,isoften “Lotto ... painted Andrea de gli Odoni, whose thought to be inspired by Lotto’s composition 10 12 house in Venice is full of painting and sculpture.” (Metropolitan Museum, New York). Although Vasari’s mention of Odoni’s house Uffelen brought Odoni’sportraitbacktohis indicates how well known the collection was in house in Amsterdam, where he also exhibited © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-84408-6 — The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy Monika Schmitter Excerpt More Information 4 INTRODUCTION augmented by the indefatigable Venetian scholar Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna (1789–1868)invol- ume 3 (1830) of his six-volume Delle iscrizioni veneziane. Cicogna provided more information about the family and visited the still-standing house with a contemporary descendant of the Odoni family. Although Morelli and Cicogna were unaware that the portrait by Lotto had survived, their research formed the basis of future scholarship. In more recent years, a few facts have been cor- rected, additional primary sources have been dis- covered, and Odoni’s biography has been fleshed 18 out, above all by Georg Gronau, Donata 19 Battilotti and Maria Teresa Franco, Rosella 20 21 Lauber, and the present author, but no mono- 22 graph has yet been published on the collector. Although the portrait itself has received scholarly attention over the years, it continues to puzzle its Fig. 2 Raphael of Urbino, Portrait of Baldassare interlocutors. As John Shearman, echoing Jacob 1514–15 Castiglione, , Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Burckhardt, correctly surmised in 1983, “the pic- Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. ture is conceptually and psychologically more 23 complex than a simple portrait of a collector.” another famous Renaissance portrait, Raphael’s Lotto’s portrait is widely regarded as one of the 13 Baldassare Castiglione (Fig. 2). After Uffelen’s most accomplished and innovative of the Italian death, Odoni’s portrait was purchased in 1639 by Renaissance – perhaps the best portrait by another Amsterdam collector, Gerard Reynst, and a painter known for his profound and idiosyncratic while in the Reynst collection, it was engraved by approach to the genre.