The halberdier

The halberdier
Jacopo da Pontormo , ca.1529/30 or 1537
Oil on wood, transferred to canvas
92 × 72 cm
Getty Museum

The halberdier is a painting by the Italian mannerist Jacopo da Pontormo .

In 1989, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles bought the painting at Christie's for $ 35.2 million.

Who is shown here has not yet been conclusively proven. The thesis that the young man is Cosimo de 'Medici , as noted in an inventory from 1621, has long been supported by research. Accordingly, it shows the then 18-year-old Cosimo as a soldier after the battle of Montemurlo .

In the 2004 exhibition catalog of the Philadelphia Museum of Art , the picture is shown under the title “Francesco Guardi as a Halberdier” and thus identified with the picture which Vasari describes in his vite as follows: “At the time of the siege of Florence he portrayed [Pontormo ] Francesco Guardi in a soldier's suit, which was a very fine work. ”Francesco Guardi, born in 1514, was a soldier in the Republic of Florence when the city was besieged by the imperial troops under Charles V. This identification by Elizabeth Cropper is now also used by the Getty -Museum represented.

Provenance

According to an inventory from 1612, in which the picture is listed as a portrait of Cosimo de 'Medici, the picture fell to the Riccardi family after the death of the Florentine Riccardo Romolo Riccardi. From 1748 to 1813 it was owned by Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun (1748–1813), a great-nephew of Charles Lebrun . In an auction in Paris on March 20, 1810, it was sold to Cardinal Joseph Fesch , an uncle of Napoleon Bonaparte and one of the most important art collectors of his time. After further changes in ownership, it probably came in 1861 in the possession of Mathilde Bonaparte , it remained in until the 1904th In 1904 it was bought by the art collector Eugène Kraemer in an auction on May 17th.

The picture was then auctioned off in 1914 by the American businessman and director of the New York City Bank, James Stillman (1850-1918). Since then the picture has been in the United States. After Stillman's death, it came by inheritance to Charles Chauncey Stillman (1877-1926), was acquired in 1927 by Chauncey Devereaux Stillman (1907-1989). It was shown on loan from the New York Frick Collection until 1970 . After Stillman's death in 1989, it was offered for sale at Christie's and went to the Getty Museum on May 31, 1989.

description

The three-quarter portrait depicts an elegant young man, dressed in a wide-sleeved light-colored jacket made of heavy silk, a crooked red beret on his head and a halberd in his right hand , the blade of which is cut off from the upper edge of the picture, while the left hand casually on the hip is supported.

He stands in front of an almost black, monochrome picture ground on which only faint contours of the corner of massive architecture can be distinguished. He wears red trousers that are attached to his jacket with ribbon ties . The light white silk undergarment peeks out from under the stand-up collar, the cuffs and between the jacket and the eye-catching braguette . The jacket is belted with a narrow leather strap from which a parade sword hangs. He wears a long gold chain around his neck, and a gold medallion depicts the battle between Heracles and Antaeus on the beret .

The materiality of the various materials - clothing, weapons, jewelry - is executed with extraordinary brilliance and painterly perfection, from the soft down of the feather on the beret, to the heavy duchess of the jacket and the delicate silk of the undergarment to the golden link chain with a metal tip reinforced leather belt and the sword with the artfully forged basket and the grained wooden shaft of the halberd.

literature

• Giorgio Vasari: The Life of Pontormo. Edition Giorgio Vasari, Vol. 4. Ed. By Alessandro Nova . Newly translated and edited by Katja Burzer. Berlin: Wagenbach 2004. ISBN 978-3-8031-5023-3

• Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici. The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence . Ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke. Philadelphia Museum of Art 2004. ISBN 0-87633-180-0

• Elizabeth Cropper: Pontormo: portrait of a halberdier . Los Angeles: Getty Museum 1997.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Triumph in the carnival. An exhibition in the Uffizi. In: Der Spiegel. No. 41.1996, accessed March 5, 2015
2. ^ The New York Times, June 1, 1989 , accessed March 8, 2015
3. ↑ Cropper 1997.
4. ↑ Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?); The Paul Getty Museum San Francisco. accessed on March 8, 2015.
5. ^ Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici. Philadelphia 2005. p. 92.