Vincenzo Cappello, c. 1550/1560

This portrait is known in at least four other contemporary versions or copies: in the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia[fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Here attributed to Jacopo Tintoretto, Vincenzo Cappello, c. 1570/1575, oil on canvas, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.;[1]  [1]
Published by Wilhelm Suida, Tizian (Zurich and Leipzig, 1933), 81–82, 160–161, 184, pl. 143, when in the Schnackenberg collection, Munich; sold Sotheby’s, London, Nov. 28, 1956, no. 19 (with confused provenance). in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Here attributed to Workshop of Titian, Portrait of Admiral Vincenzo Cappello, c. 1560/1570, oil on canvas, The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Pavel Demidov;[2]  [2]
Formerly in the Stroganoff collection, Saint Petersburg; see Tamara Fomichova, The Hermitage Catalogue of West European Painting, Vol. 2: Venetian Painting of the Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Florence, 1992), 348–349. in the Seminario Vescovile, Padua;[3]  [3]
See Edoardo Arslan, Inventario degli oggetti d’arte d’Italia, Vol. 7: Provincia di Padova (Rome, 1936), 172, as a copy by Palma Giovane after the Hermitage picture; Stefania Mason Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane: L’opera completa (Milan, 1984), 171, as a copy after the present picture. and in the Koelikker collection, Milan.[4]  [4]
Formerly in the Dunmore and Allendale collections. See Peter Humfrey, in The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections, ed. Aidan Weston-Lewis (Edinburgh, 2004), 124, 432 n. 6; and A. Perissa Torrini, in Titien: Le pouvoir en face (Milan, 2006), 136 (with an attribution to Tintoretto). According to John Shearman, x-radiographs have revealed that yet another version was originally painted under the Titian workshop picture Titian and His Friends at Hampton Court (illustrated under Andrea de’ Franceschi).[5]  [5]
John Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 1983), 270. Of these versions, the Gallery’s picture is now generally accepted as the earliest and the finest, and before it entered the Kress collection in 1954, the identity of the sitter, established by Victor Lasareff in 1923 with reference to the Hermitage version, has never subsequently been doubted.[6]  [6]
Victor Lasareff, “Ein Bildnis des Vincenzo Capello von Tintoretto,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 44 (1923): 172–177. Lasareff retained a traditional attribution to Tintoretto, and Rodolfo Pallucchini and W. R. Rearick upheld a similarly traditional attribution to Tintoretto of the present version.[7]  [7]
Rodolfo Pallucchini, Tiziano (Florence, 1969), 1:90; William R. Rearick, in Venezia da stato a mito (Venice, 1997), 335–336. Other critics who have attributed it to Tintoretto include Bernard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (New York and London, 1894), 136; Bernard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, 3rd ed. (New York and London, 1906), 136, but no longer in the editions of 1932 or 1957; Henry Thode, Tintoretto (Bielefeld, 1901), 80; Ettore Camesasca, ed., Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, comm. Fidenzio Pertile (Milan, 1960), 3:489; Antonio Morassi, “Titian,” in Encyclopedia of World Art (London, 1967), 14: col. 139 (as School of Tintoretto); and Stefania Mason Rinaldi, “Tiziano nelle collezioni scozzesi: Note in margine alla mostra di Edimburgo,” Studi Tizianeschi 3 (2005): 85. Francesco Valcanover, in 1960 and 1969, implied doubt that it is by Titian, and both Valcanover (1999) and Filippo Pedrocco (2001) omitted it from their catalogs of his works. See Francesco Valcanover, Tutta la pittura di Tiziano (Milan, 1960), 1:102; Francesco Valcanover, L’opera completa di Tiziano (Milan, 1969), 141, no. 631; Francesco Valcanover, Tiziano: I suoi pennelli sempre partorirono espressioni di vita (Florence, 1999); and Filippo Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings (New York, 2001). But as argued by Wilhelm Suida in 1933 with reference to the Chrysler version (then in Munich), and by Fern Rusk Shapley and Harold Wethey with reference to the present version, an attribution to Titian is more likely.[8]  [8]
Wilhelm Suida, Tizian (Zurich and Leipzig, 1933), 81–82; Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI Century (London, 1968), 181–182; Harold Wethey, The Paintings of Titian (London, 1971), 2:83–84. Consistent with the latter attribution is the frequent identification of the picture with a documented portrait of Cappello by Titian, recorded in a eulogistic letter and sonnet sent by Pietro Aretino to the sitter’s nephew Niccolò Molin on Christmas Day 1540.[9]  [9]
Ettore Camesasca, ed., Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, comm. Fidenzio Pertile (Milan, 1957), 1:CIX, 177–178.

Vincenzo di Niccolò Cappello (1469–1541) was a member of a Venetian patrician family, several of whose members pursued distinguished careers in the navy.[10]  [10]
For Cappello’s biography, see Achille Olivieri, “Vincenzo Cappello,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. Alberto Maria Ghisalberti (Rome, 1975), 18:827–830. Vincenzo himself served five times as Capitano Generale da Mar, an achievement that is noted in the inscription QUINQUIES DUX on the Chrysler version of the portrait. His authority as a naval commander also brought him political honors and responsibilities: in 1504 he was knighted by Henry VII of England; from 1515 to 1519, he was governor of Famagosta in Cyprus; in 1522 he was nominated as ambassador to the papal court; in 1539 he was made procurator of San Marco. His high reputation and popularity at home suffered a setback following his defeat by the Turks at the battle of Prevesa, off Epirus, in 1538, but in the final, difficult years of his life, he also found a stout public defender in Pietro Aretino, whose letter of 1540 lavishes praise on his military valor in the glorious defense of the Christian religion. Aretino also mentions the majesty of aspect conveyed by Titian’s portrait; by showing Cappello in full armor and grasping the baton of command, this was clearly designed to express the authority of a venerable military leader who had passed a lifetime in the faithful service of the Venetian state. Under the terms of his will, a full-length standing statue of Cappello was placed above the main portal of his parish church of Santa Maria Formosa. Executed by Domenico di Pietro Grazioli da Salò, it again shows the admiral holding a baton, but this time dressed in a military costume all’antica.[11]  [11]
Domenico’s statue is usually dated to soon after Cappello’s death in 1541, but as pointed out by Martin, it could equally date from the 1550s or later. See Thomas Martin, Alessandro Vittoria and the Portrait Bust in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1998), 40 n. 55.

Cappello’s celebrity as a military commander led to a demand for painted portraits of him, from both within and beyond Venice. In 1560, for example, the magistracy of the Procuratia de Supra paid for a portrait for its office in the Piazza di San Marco, a work that was still recorded there by Fulgenzio Manfredi in 1602 and Giovanni Stringa in 1604.[12]  [12]
For the documented portrait commission in 1560, see Wilhelm von Bode, Georg Gronau, and Detlev von Hadeln, Archivalische Beiträge zur Geschichte der venezianischen Kunst aus dem Nachlass Gustav Ludwigs (Berlin, 1911), 128. It is recorded in the second room of the Procuratia de Supra by Fulgenzio Manfredi, Dignità Procuratoria di San Marco di Venetia (Venice, 1602); and Giovanni Stringa, in Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare (1581) . . . et hora con molta dilienza corretta, emendata, e più d’un terzo di cose nuove ampliata dal M. R. D. Giovanni Stringa (Venice, 1604), 217r. The painter is not mentioned either by the document or by Stringa; according to Manfredi most of the portraits in the room were by Tintoretto, but a few were by Titian. Hadeln reasoned that on balance of probability, this version of the portrait was by Tintoretto. Detlev von Hadeln, “Beiträge zur Tintorettoforschung,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 32 (1911): 43–44. At least a decade earlier, the eminent humanist Paolo Giovio must have acquired a portrait for his celebrated gallery in Como, and as the owner pointed out, the sitter was portrayed in the very armor that he had worn at the Battle of Prevesa.[13]  [13]
Paolo Giovio, Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium (Basel, 1575), 6:329. See also Diane H. Bodart, “Le reflet et l’éclat: Jeux de l’envers dans la peinture vénitienne du XVIe siècle,” in Titien, Tintoret, Véronèse: Rivalités à Venise (Paris, 2009), 236. Giovio’s picture was clearly based on the original by Titian, since a bust-length copy of it, inscribed VINCENTIUS CAPPELLO, made on commission from Grand Duke Cosimo I by his court painter Cristofano dell’Altissimo, remains in the Uffizi in Florence. A woodcut version by Tobias Stimmer is also included in the 1575 Basel edition of Giovio’s Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium.[14]  [14]
Paolo Giovio, Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium (Basel, 1575), 6:329. The portrait owned by Giovio was still in the possession of his family in 1881, but it has since disappeared. See Giovanni Giovio, Lari artistici: Collezioni (Como, 1881), 85. As pointed out by Lasareff, the Como version of Giovio’s portrait of Cappello—and hence also the original—must have been painted before 1552, the date of Giovio’s death.[15]  [15]
Victor Lasareff, “Ein Bildnis des Vincenzo Capello von Tintoretto,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 44 (1923): 172–177.

Lasareff, who identified the Hermitage version (fig. 2) as the original, and who also assumed that it was painted in the sitter’s lifetime, concluded that it was one of Tintoretto’s earliest works. But other critics who have upheld the attribution to Tintoretto have forgotten Lasareff’s firmly established terminus ante quem of 1552. In particular, Rearick suggested a date of circa 1572/1575, contemporary with a number of other official portraits by Tintoretto of Venetian admirals, including the Sebastiano Venier (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and the Tommaso Contarini (Musée de la Ville, Narbonne).[16]  [16]
William R. Rearick, in Venezia da stato a mito (Venice, 1997), 335–336. Unlike these sitters, Cappello had died 30 years earlier, and Rearick saw his portrait as a posthumous commission by his family, as part of an effort to rehabilitate his memory. In support of this theory, Rearick quoted a will of 1601 dictated by Vincenzo di Domenico Cappello, nephew and heir to Vincenzo di Niccolò, in which he speaks of four family portraits. These were named as of his grandfather Niccolò, by Palma; of himself and his father, by Titian; and of his uncle Vincenzo, by Tintoretto. For Rearick, the first of these portraits is perhaps identifiable with a full-length portrait of Niccolò Cappello at Chatsworth, attributed by Bernard Berenson to Palma Giovane (in which case, it, too, would be posthumous);[17]  [17]
The portrait is inscribed NICOLAUS/ CAPPELLUS/ TER CLASI/ PRAEFECTUS. A half-length portrait, apparently of the same sitter, formerly in the Schlichting collection in Paris and now in the Louvre, was supposed by Emil Schäffer, “Noch einmal das Bildnis des Vincenzo Capello,” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 2 (1909): 158–160, followed by Victor Lasareff, “Ein Bildnis des Vincenzo Capello von Tintoretto,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 44 (1923): 172–177, to be Titian’s portrait of Vincenzo Cappello; but it, too, was convincingly reattributed to Palma Giovane by Bernard Berenson, “While on Tintoretto,” in Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1927), 226, fig. 2. For these portraits, see Stefania Mason Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane: L’opera completa (Milan, 1984), 80, no. 57, and 101, no. 207; the author plausibly identifies the sitter as Niccolò di Vincenzo Cappello (born 1547), rather than as the 15th-century Niccolò Cappello. the pair by Titian must be lost; and the last, by Tintoretto, is identifiable with the present picture.

Rearick did not, however, develop the stylistic comparison with the portraits of admirals by Tintoretto that he considered similar to the Vincenzo Cappello; and, in fact, although these may be seen as deriving from it, the resemblances remain superficial. Characteristic of Tintoretto’s treatment of highlights are the rapid slashes of unblended white paint that criss-cross the sitter’s armor in the Sebastiano Venier, whereas the more varied brushwork and richer range of textural effects in the Vincenzo Cappello are equally characteristic of Titian. The portrait by Tintoretto mentioned in the will of 1601 was probably instead a copy or variant of the present picture, which by this date had already passed out of the family’s possession. A likely candidate, in fact, for Tintoretto’s version of Titian’s original is provided by the picture now in the Chrysler collection (fig. 1), in which the much finer, more linear treatment of the hair and beard, the unblended white highlights of the cloak, and the taller dome of the balding head, all seem typical, despite the contrary opinion of Suida and Bertina Suida Manning, and of Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, of the younger master.[18]  [18]
Wilhelm Suida, Tizian (Zurich and Leipzig, 1933), 81–82; Bertina Suida Manning, “Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto in the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.,” Arte veneta 16 (1962): 49–50; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Boston, 2009), 284 n. 60. Although the Chrysler portrait may well be identical with that mentioned in the will of Vincenzo di Domenico Cappello in 1601, it is equally possible that it is the one commissioned in 1560 for the Procuratia de Supra, and recorded there by Manfredi (1602) and Stringa (1604) (see Entry note 12). Both writers mentioned that Cappello is shown, as in the Chrysler picture, with five batons of command rather than the three shown by Titian.

Confirmation that the Gallery’s picture precedes these other known versions is provided by the design changes revealed in the x-radiograph [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] X-radiograph, Titian and Workshop, Vincenzo Cappello, c. 1550/1560, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection. This is not necessarily, however, to conclude that it is identical with the portrait of 1540 recorded by Aretino. Comparison with Titian’s portraits of this period—including the Cardinal Pietro Bembo of 1539/1540 and the Ranuccio Farnese of 1541–1542, which hang close to it in the National Gallery of Art—show that they are compositionally more compact and pictorially more precise, while the very broad brushwork of the Vincenzo Cappello implies a date of a good decade later. If the present picture indeed dates from the 1550s—as was already implied by Diane H. Bodart[19]  [19]
Diane H. Bodart, “Le reflet et l’éclat: Jeux de l’envers dans la peinture vénitienne du XVIe siècle,” in Titien, Tintoret, Véronèse: Rivalités à Venise (Paris, 2009), 236. —its composition is nevertheless likely to have followed, or to have been elaborated from, that of the lost original of 1540, especially since the sitter died in the following year, and there would have been no opportunity to paint a portrait with a new composition from life. Titian was likely to have been aided in this task by his workshop—as already concluded respectively by Tamara Fomichova and Stefania Mason Rinaldi—which would then have been entirely responsible for the versions in the Hermitage (fig. 2) and Padua,[20]  [20]
Tamara Fomichova, The Hermitage Catalogue of West European Painting, Vol. 2: Venetian Painting of the Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Florence, 1992), 348–349; Stefania Mason Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane: L’opera completa (Milan, 1984), 171. and also for the one in Milan. It remains an open question whether the version owned by Paolo Giovio was based on the lost original of 1540 or the present version, but in the latter case the Washington portrait would have to date from before 1552.

As pointed out by Lasareff, the composition of the Gallery’s picture, like that of its presumed prototype, develops that of Titian’s Francesco Maria della Rovere (Uffizi, Florence) of 1536–1538, in which a military commander is similarly portrayed standing in knee-length, wearing gleaming armor, holding a baton in his right hand, and in front of a shelf displaying his helmet and further batons. In pose and accoutrements, the Vincenzo Cappello may also be compared with several of Titian’s portraits of Eleven Caesars, painted for the duke of Mantua in 1536–1540 (lost, but recorded in the engravings of Aegedius Sadeler). It is natural that Titian, commissioned to paint a Venetian military hero in or just before 1540, should have adapted a formula recently devised for similarly martial images for the dukes of Urbino and Mantua. In turn, it provided the inspiration for Venetian warrior portraits of the later 16th century, including Tintoretto’s Sebastiano Venier, Veronese’s Agostino Barbarigo, and Palma Giovane’s Niccolò Cappello.[21]  [21]
Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Boston, 2009), 210–215.

Peter Humfrey

March 21, 2019