Overview
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) wears the red biretta and cape of a cardinal. At the time Titian painted this portrait, Bembo had recently been elevated to that status in honor of his service to the Church and his scholarly career, although the writer’s literary output was almost entirely secular. Most significantly, he was responsible for the Aldine editions (printed in Venice, for the first time in a size that was portable and easy to read) of Dante and Petrarch, which served as a foundation for Bembo’s codification of the Tuscan language as a literary medium.
Bembo was also keenly interested in art and assembled an outstanding collection of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and other objects that reflected his personal interests and refined tastes. He is known to have been cordial with Titian, who produced other portraits of him. The present example depicts Bembo at age 69, his features alert with intellectual energy and his pose and gesture suggestive of rhetoric and debate.
Entry
The traditional attribution to
Bembo’s historical importance is owing above all to his Aldine editions of Dante and Petrarch, which lent these authors the dignity of modern classics, and to his role in promoting the supremacy of their Tuscan language for all Italian literature. In his own day, he was also celebrated as a lyric poet and as the author of a Latin history of Venice. Bembo’s literary vocation led him from an early age away from Venice, where as a member of a patrician family he would have been expected to enter public service, to the courts of Ferrara and Urbino (1506–1512), and subsequently to that of Leo X in Rome (1512–1521). After the death of Pope Leo, he pursued his literary and scholarly career chiefly at his family villa outside Padua, becoming official historian and librarian to the Venetian Republic in 1530. He was proclaimed cardinal in March 1539 and took up residence in Rome in October of the same year. He made a final visit to northern Italy, including Venice, in the autumn of 1543, and died in Rome as bishop of Bergamo and cardinal of San Clemente in January 1547.
Although Bembo’s scholarly career was crowned with the award of a cardinal’s hat, his literary output was almost entirely secular, and his religious piety was no more than conventional. He was ordained as a priest only in December 1539, and although in his final years in Rome he was a friend of luminaries of the Catholic Reform, such as Cardinal Pole and Vittoria Colonna, he did not share their reforming zeal. By contrast, he took a keen interest in ancient and modern art, and during his years in Padua, he assembled one of the finest collections of paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts in northern Italy. His friend Marcantonio Michiel compiled a detailed description of Bembo’s “museum” as it had evolved by circa 1530.
The present portrait, in which Bembo wears the red biretta and cape of a cardinal, must have been painted between March 1539, the date of the official proclamation of his elevation, and May 30, 1540, the date of a letter sent by Bembo in Rome to his friend Girolamo Querini in Venice. In the letter Bembo asks Querini to thank Titian for the gift of the “second portrait” of him, which he has just received, and adds that although he had intended to pay the painter for it, he would instead find another way of adequately returning the favor.
Further circumstantial evidence confirming that both these portraits were painted in the brief period 1538 to 1540 is provided by the relative length of Bembo’s beard. Up to 1532, as shown by Belli’s medal (fig. 1), Bembo was clean-shaven. In a letter of 1536, Benedetto Varchi in Venice wrote to Benvenuto Cellini in Rome that Bembo was letting his beard grow.
Unlike the more contemplative image in Naples, in which the aged Bembo appears almost like an oriental magus, the present portrait shows him as a still-vigorous 69-year-old, his features alert with intellectual energy and his pose and gesture suggestive of rhetoric and debate. As pointed out by Peter Burke, it may be no coincidence that the outstretched hand, with the palm facing upward, corresponds to the gesture recommended by Quintilian for the beginning of a speech, in Book 11 of his much-consulted Education of the Orator.
Peter Humfrey
March 21, 2019
Provenance
Probably commissioned by the sitter, Cardinal Pietro Bembo [1470-1547], Padua and Rome; by inheritance to his son, Torquato Bembo [1525-1595].[1] probably (Ferrante Carlo [1578-1641], Rome), and acquired from him before 1631 by Don Fabrizio Valguarnera [d. 1632], Rome.[2] Leone Galli; acquired 1636 by Cardinal Antonio Barberini [1608-1671], Palazzo Barberini, Rome; by inheritance to his nephew, Maffeo Barberini, Principe di Palestrina [d. 1685], Rome; by inheritance to his son, Urbano Barberini, Rome;[3] still in the Barberini collection, Rome, c. 1904-1905;[4] Elia Volpi [1858-1938], Florence; sold 1905 to (Colnaghi's, London and New York), on joint account with (M. Knoedler & Co., New York); sold 1906 to Charles M. Schwab [1862-1939], New York;[5] (his estate sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 3 December 1942, no. 32); purchased by Stephen Pichetto for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[6] gift 1952 to NGA.
Associated Names
Barberini, Antonio, CardinalBarberini, Maffeo, Prince
Bembo, Cardinal Pietro
Bembo, Torquato
Carlo, Ferrante
Colnaghi & Co., Ltd., P. & D.
Galli, Leone
Knoedler & Company, M.
Kress Foundation, Samuel H.
Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc.
Schwab, Charles M.
Valguarnera, Don Fabrizio
Volpi, Elia, Professor
Exhibition History
- 1920
- Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1920, unnumbered catalogue.
- 1946
- Recent Additions to the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1946, no. 826.
- 1990
- Tiziano [NGA title: Titian: Prince of Painters], Palazzo Ducale, Venice; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1990-1991, no. 31, repro.
- 1996
- Treasures of Venice, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, 1996, unnumbered catalogue, repro.
- 2013
- Pietro Bembo e l'invenzione del Rinascimento, Palazzo del Monte di Pieta, Padua, 2013, no. 6.1, repro.
Technical Summary
The original, medium-weight, plain-weave fabric was last relined in 1943, and its tacking margins have been cropped. The off-white ground is thinly applied, and examination with infrared reflectography at 1.5 to 1.8 microns
The paint surface is somewhat abraded, giving a misleading effect of smoothness and lack of finish, although the arm at the lower right does appear always to have been unresolved and without detail. Darkened repaint can be seen strengthening the hair, beard, contours of the cape, fingers, and palm.
Peter Humfrey and Joanna Dunn based on the examination reports by Sarah Fisher and Joanna Dunn
March 21, 2019
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