This painting was purchased at a Tajan auction in Paris in 2007. It has two labels on the back that record the examination conducted by Eric Turquin, who wrote a report on its state of preservation upon being put up for auction.1
The painted surface of this small oil painting on canvas stands out for its general thinning, most evident in the depleted textural rendering of the skin and the beard that frames the face. Before the auction, Tajan’s experts submitted the portrait to Nicholas Turner who, on the basis of the photograph, confirmed its attribution to Barocci, recognising the typical manner of the artist in the depiction of the face and collar, as well as in the unique psychological intonation, veined with melancholic accents.2 Andrea Emiliani also shares this opinion. Indeed, in a written message dated March 2007,3 he compared the painting to two self-portraits of Federico Barocci at the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence,4 as well as to the oil study on paper for one of them, belonging to the Residenzgalerie in Salzburg.5 Some have suggested that we can identify the features of Barocci himself in the painting in question, although this is problematic due to the considerable physiognomic differences that emerge from the comparison of the portrait in the Cerruti Collection with the already recorded Florentine self- portraits of the painter. Nevertheless, its inclusion in the series of portraits by the artist from Urbino seems entirely convincing, as it meets all the main requirements, including its half-bust size with a neutral background, the natural pose and the sensitive look into the subject’s mind, adopting an approach that stands out clearly from the formal and psychological abstraction of international portrait painting widespread throughout late 16th-century courts. As well as being compared with the above-mentioned self-portraits in the Uffizi in Florence, the canvas in question can also be compared with the Portrait of a Man attributed to Barocci and conserved in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini, Rome.6 All these paintings play upon the pictorial counterpoint between the softened rendering of the faces and the more full-bodied and striking depiction of the white collars. In comparison with the superb standard of this autograph portrait studies, the Portrait in the Cerruti Collection, partly due to its state of preservation, nevertheless reveals a lower overall quality, leading us to suppose that the painting may have been executed by the master’s assistants, in keeping with a modus operandi practised by Barocci in his portrait production.7 

[Paolo Vanoli]

1 Cerruti Collection Archives, Eric Turquin Expertise S.A., Vente du 20 juin 2007 - Rapports de condition, 14 June 2007. 

2 Cerruti Collection Archives, e-mail from Nicholas Turner to Pierre Etienne, 28 June 2007. 

3 Cerruti Collection Archives, message from Andrea Emiliani to Sergio Corbello, 21 March 2007. 

4 They can be seen in Emiliani 2008, vol. I, pp. 242-243, no. 29; vol. II, p. 184, no. 60. 

5 Ibid., vol. II, p. 187, no. 61. 

6 Ibid., vol. II, p. 377, no. 96. 

7 Ibid., vol. I, p. 69.