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'Portrait of a Young Man', about 1518, by Rosso Fiorentino (1494 - 1540)
On view in Room 8 from 29 November 2000
The National Gallery has been fortunate to acquire a rare and striking portrait by Rosso Fiorentino (1494 - 1540), by Private Treaty sale from a British private collection. Recent generous legacies have helped towards the purchase price of around £2 million, payable in more than one financial year. The remainder has come primarily from private support.
Rosso was one of the most original, talented and unconventional Florentine artists of the early 16th century. As a young man he worked in the shop of Andrea del Sarto, alongside another brilliant young painter, Jacopo Pontormo, his exact contemporary. Responding to the innovations of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo - all active in Florence in the previous decade - the younger artist's experiments with brilliant colours, a freer technique and more abstract forms laid the foundations for a new style of painting, subsequently termed 'mannerism'.
Rosso's approach to painting was more radical even than Pontormo's, and several of his early Florentine patrons were baffled by the wild and dazzling images he produced. This explains why, after 1519, he worked mainly outside his native city, at first elsewhere in Tuscany and in Rome, and then in France, where, for King Francis I, he created mythological paintings of astounding originality. His career was abruptly curtailed by his suicide in 1540.
The portrait, the earliest of only five known by Rosso, and in excellent condition, is a quintessential product of his first Florentine period. It reveals something of the artist's eccentricity, so alien to his contemporaries, particularly in the strange spiky fingers, the curiously abstract style (especially in the costume) and the characteristically swift and almost impetuous manner of working the paint. Although it is not signed, the handling of the paint is itself a signature, most notably in the face where the forms all but dissolve in a welter of frenzied hatching. The almost disturbingly prominent brushstrokes in the features nevertheless miraculously cohere at a distance into a powerfully convincing and memorable likeness.
The sitter, yet to be identified, glances up from the letter he has just received, as though interrupted by the viewer. His gaze is at once dreamy yet also penetrating. This sense of psychological realism and immediacy was only just beginning to find a place in portraiture at the time the work was painted, appealing to the rising class of wealthy and intellectual patrons. The letter, dated 22 June 1518, bears traces of writing which may yield clues to the sitter's identity.
Rosso's 'Portrait of a Young Man' makes a handsome addition to the works currently displayed in Room 8, permitting fascinating comparisons with portraits by Raphael, Rosso's mentor Andrea del Sarto, and Franciabigio, another young artist associated with Sarto's shop who worked alongside Rosso and Pontormo in the cloister of the Servite church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. With its extraordinary technique and subtle and complex characterisation, this arresting new acquisition makes a significant contribution to the story of the development of Florentine portraiture.
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