Catalog 2 - Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Young Man (Pietro Bembo?), c. 1505–10, oil on panel, The Royal Collection, Hampton Court
Evidence 1648
Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte overo le vite de gli’llustri pittori veneti e dello stato
Molti furono i ritratti fatti dal Bellino di Personaggi, ed huomini illustri […] di Pietro Bembo prima, che fosse Cardinale; per lo cui fece anco il ritratto d’una sua favorita, che dalla pena di quel chiaro scrittore fù in tale guisa celebrato. [followed by Bembo’s sonnet (Rime XIX)208
Comments
Stylistically this painting dates c. 1505–10. Following Ridolfi, Goldscheider was the first to suggest the sitter to be Pietro in this painting now at Hampton Court.209 No documentary evidence survives that attaches Bembo and Bellini through a portrait, and thus the identity of the sitter is not universally accepted.210 Recently the work has been argued by Debra Pincus to be a portrait of Bembo, as she sees the italic signature as evidence of Pietro and Giovanni’s interactions in 1505–06 and of the artist’s absorption of humanist epigraphic investigations and typefaces prevalent in the print culture in Venice, in which Pietro was heavily involved.211
208 Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell'arte, ouero le vite de gli'llustri pittori veneti e dello stato, 1:56-57.
209 Ludwig Goldscheider and Philip Hendy, Giovanni Bellini (London: Phaidon Press, 1945), 73.
210 John Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 41-43, no. 37. Shearman maps the critical history of this piece, noting those who agree with the identity of the sitter. He argues that the sitter should remain anonymous. Lucy Whitacker, The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance & Baroque (London: Royal Collection, 2007), 180. Here it is argued that the sitter’s dress is that of the cittadino class, of which Bembo was not. Also, the subjectivity of portraiture of Bembo that survives from thirty years later when he was in his sixties is not seen as true enough to confirm the sitter’s identity.
211 Pincus, "Giovanni Bellini's Humanist Signature: Pietro Bembo, Aldus Manutius and Humanism in Early Sixteenth-Century Venice," 98-99. Pincus sees the black berretta and mantello as being a Venetian patrician’s and thus supports the identity as Bembo, a member of that class. Citing the portrait medals of Cattaneo and Belli and the Titian, she argues a likeness, although there are an intervening 30 years left unaccounted for.
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