Giovanni Battista Moroni 1520/4–1579
NG 697 
The Tailor (‘Il Tagliapanni’ )

Nicholas Penny, 2004

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume I: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2004).

1565–70

Oil on canvas, 99.5 × 77 cm

Support

The measurements given above are those of the stretcher. The approximate size of the original painted area is 93 × 72 cm.

The original canvas is of a medium‐fine tabby weave. Cusping is evident on all four edges, and there are two sets of tacking holes (the earlier of the two being the outer one). The canvas was made up at its edges with filler that extends nearly to the edges of the lining canvas (which is also of a medium tabby weave), to which it is attached with a glue paste. The stretcher is of stained pine, with crossbars stamped at the top: G. MORRILL LINER.

Materials and Technique

The artist’s usual brown imprimitura is visible as a fringe beside the sitter’s left hand. Some broad preliminary sketching in black or grey paint is apparent below the tunic. Some of the most exquisite passages in the painting were executed wet‐in‐wet – the grey mixed with ginger in the beard, for example, and the grey in the shadows in the tunic.

Some minor pentimenti are apparent in the man’s left hand, and (in the X‐radiographs) in the cuff of his right hand. The flesh is rather thinly painted, as is typical of some of Moroni’s last paintings.¹ For further discussion of Moroni’s techniques, see p. 196.

Conservation

Although the manuscript catalogue contains no record that the painting received any treatment, the Gallery’s accounts reveal that on 28 March 1863 Raffaelle Pinti was paid £10 10s. for restoring it, and a fortnight earlier, on 14 March, George Morrill had received a payment, presumably for lining it and presumably also for extending the canvas (see above).² The diary of the Keeper, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, indicates that the painting was sent to be lined on 14 February 1863 and returned on 13 March. Pinti’s work had probably been completed by then; it had in any case certainly been completed by 19 March, when the painting was photographed.³ Between October 1968 and February 1969 the painting was cleaned and restored. It was decided that the extensions to the canvas should not be removed.

Condition

The painting is somewhat abraded and some of the tops of the canvas threads are exposed, unsurprisingly, since the original paint was very thin in some areas (for example, the flesh on the back of the man’s right hand), but the areas of impasto are admirably well preserved. The shadows in the central area of the breeches have blanched slightly. Retouchings in the background to the right have discoloured. The trace of a water stain is just visible in the sitter’s right hand and on part of the table below it. The corner of the table to the left was not part of the artist’s design, but the corner of the cloth at the centre, although very near the edge of the canvas, was part of it. In the slashes of the breeches the contrast between pale yellow and moss green may have originally been softened with a glaze.

Attribution and Dating

The painting seems never to have been attributed to any other artist. Judging from the style of the sitter’s dress and the style of painting, it is clearly a late work. Gregori suggests a date of 1565–8, which seems judicious; Gould, followed by Braham, places it around 1570.⁴

Reputation, Interpretation, Acquisition

This painting, together with ‘Titian’s schoolmaster’, is the most famous of all portraits by Moroni. It was recorded by Marco Boschini, the indefatigable chronicler of Venetian art and enthusiastic advocate of Venetian painting, in his poem La Carta del Navegar Pitoresco of 1660 as being in the picture gallery of the Casa Grimani at S. Maria Formosa; it had, therefore, perhaps been acquired by the great collector who built that palace, Cardinal Giovanni Grimani, Patriarch of Acquileia (1501–1593). Another portrait by Moroni, of Ercole Tasso, now in the Art Institute in Lanesville, Ohio, was also in the gallery, but it was The Tailor that Boschini noted ‘in particular’ among the works by ‘quel Moron, quel Bergamasco’:Quel d’un Sartor, sì belo, e sì ben fato,
Che’l parla più de qual se sia Avocato;
L’hà in man la forfe, e vù el vedè a tagiar⁵

But if The Tailor enjoyed a reputation among connoisseurs in the seventeenth century, it was completely forgotten during the eighteenth.

The painting seems to have left the Grimani Collection early in the nineteenth century, if not before. A guidebook of the palace, undated but probably of the early nineteenth century, entitled Pitture e scolture nel palazzo di Casa Grimani, S. Maria Formosa, only refers loosely to the easel pictures: ‘Tutti i quadri sono antichi di autori diversi …’⁶ Little can be deduced from this, save that a good many paintings remained there. The collector Antonio Piccinelli di Seriate, in his manuscript annotations to Tassi’s Vite dei pittori, records that he saw the painting in 1845 on a visit to Venice in the company of Giuseppe Fumagalli (a dealer and restorer active in Bergamo). It belonged to the painter ‘Schiavoni’, who had recently acquired it for ‘circa 18 talleri’. The painting had the price of 60 gold napoleons, but when offered this sum Schiavoni refused to sell. This ‘Schiavoni’ must be either Natale Schiavoni or his son Felice, still active in 1860, as we know from both Mündler’s and Eastlake’s diaries.⁷ Piccinelli further records that a rival collector, Federico Frizzoni de Salis, bought the painting from Schiavoni the following year (1846) for 100 napoleons. Nearly a decade later, in 1855, Eastlake recorded it among many other pictures in Frizzoni’s villa at Bellagio on Lake Como: ‘Il taglia panni – an emblematical portrait of a young man as a tailor in allusion to his name (cloth & scissors).’⁸ This theory (perhaps Frizzoni’s own) reflects Eastlake’s assumption that [page 237][page 238]Moroni would not have painted a portrait of a mere tailor, or perhaps registers his surprise that a craftsman or tradesman could have such a genteel air.⁹

Eastlake was invited by Frizzoni to view his collection again in 1862 because he wished to sell some or all of it, in particular a Moretto and a Boltraffio. Eastlake inspected these on 31 August and 1 September but did not consider them ‘eligible’. Looking again at the Moroni, however, he found it ‘quite el.’, despite the ‘low tone of the flesh’.¹⁰ In his report to the Board composed on 27 November he noted that ‘Sig. Frizzoni was absent, & it was not till towards the close of my tour that I could communicate with him on the subject. He was, as I expected, reluctant to sell a single picture, but at length consented to part with it at the price of £320. I find, from Boschini … that about the year 1650 this picture was in a gallery in Venice. It is now on its way to England.’¹¹ Final agreement with Frizzoni was reached on 16 October, shortly before the Eastlakes recrossed the Alps.¹² The price was equivalent to 400 napoleons – that is, four times the sum Frizzoni had paid for it. Lady Eastlake recorded the transaction in her diary. ‘This will be a popular picture,’ she predicted.¹³

Ignoring Eastlake’s preference for an emblematic interpretation, Wornum, in the notes he wrote in 1876 for Etchings from the National Gallery, took the portrait literally: ‘In this instance, besides the painting, we must admire also the good sense of the tagliapanni, or cutter‐out, who has chosen to be represented engaged in his humble vocation, rather than be painted in fine clothes as a fine gentleman. He did not despise the means to which he owed his position. He is dressed in an undyed flannel jacket, and red breeches …’.¹⁴ The moral tone is retained in the anonymous sixpenny guide to the collection, published around the turn of the century by the Pall Mall Gazette and entitled Half‐Holidays at the National Gallery – this was indeed a publication intended for respectable tradesmen and educated artisans. ‘He is no Alton Locke – no discontented “tailor and poet”.’ Rather, he is satisfied with his lot. ‘He is well to do – notice his handsome ring; but he has the shears in his hands. He does the work himself, and he likes the work.’¹⁵ Thirty years before, The Times critic thought him rather to embody ‘Italian far niente’ and to be ‘the soft, sleek, slow‐moving courteous shop‐keeper’ often found in Italian towns.¹⁶

The strong suggestion of a man deferentially confronting us from behind the shop counter has convinced many modern commentators that the painting, in Braham’s words, ‘blurs the distinction between what is really portraiture and what is the depiction of everyday life’. For Braham, indeed, the painting is comparable to those by Degas which depict laundresses at work.¹⁷

Cecil Gould, following the notes of Stella Mary Pearce (Newton), observed that the clothes are ‘neither those of the artisan nor of the nobility. They are those of the middle class’.¹⁸ The colour, slashes and shape of the doublet, as well as the simple ruff at the neck and cuffs, closely resemble those worn by Sir Philip Sidney in his portrait of 1576 in the National [page 239][page 240]Portrait Gallery, even if there is no gold embroidery on the breeches and no steel gorget in NG 697 — nor is there a sword.¹⁹ The buckle‐like slide on the belt above the man’s right hip bone is, however, of precisely the kind into which the diagonal sling of a sword could be hooked as in other Moroni portraits of similar format (for example NG 2094 here).²⁰ We may thus conclude that the sitter is entitled to wear a sword but refrains from doing so. According to Arthur Symons, Walter Pater planned to make Moroni’s tailor the subject of one of his ‘imaginary portraits’, with the idea that he was a ‘Burgomaster’, but unfortunately no trace of this work survives among the author’s manuscripts.²¹ Nevertheless, this is surely on the right lines, as he may have been the senior officer of a guild.

If the sitter was indeed a tailor, it should be remembered that some members of this profession were similar in status to court painters. As Gregori points out, several artists were related to tailors – the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria was the son of a tailor, as were the painters Andrea del Sarto (‘sarto’ meaning ‘tailor’) and Annibale and Agostino Carracci. (Other families of painters could graduate into the cloth trade, as is clear from the decorations proposed for a grand room in the home of Galeazzo Campi in Mantua, which features a painting of an artist’s studio below the portrait of Galeazzo’s grandfather, the Cremonese painter, and a painting of a counting‐house with bales of cloth below Galeazzo’s own portrait.²²)

Two other portraits of tailors that were made in Italy in the sixteenth century are known to me. One, by Paris Bordone, now in the Pinacoteca, Siena, shows a man who, holding his shears, kneels before the Virgin and Child, recommended by Sant’Omobono.²³ The other is the painting now generally accepted as by Girolamo Bedoli (1500–1569) in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples (fig. 2), which was extracted in the seventeenth century by the Farnese from the Sanvitale family and described in old inventories as of ‘un sarto che fu di Paolo 3’ (that is, a tailor in the service of Pope Paul III). It has been convincingly dated to the mid‐1550s by Mario di Giampaolo.²⁴ In this case, the man has an iron rule in his right hand and holds his left hand over a pair of cloth shears, with his fingertips resting on a length of sumptuous damask. Thus there is a similar emphasis on precise measurement and cutting, but here there is also an emphasis on luxury fabric. The subject has a genial smile and a grey beard which is (by the standards of the day) unkempt. There may have been earlier examples, since Pietro Aretino lamented in a letter to Leone Leoni in 1554 that he lived in a degenerate age in which even ‘i sarti, e i beccai appaiono là vivi in pittura’ (‘even the tailors and vintners are given life by painters’).²⁵ Perhaps the earliest sixteenth‐century Italian portrait of a sitter of relatively modest social standing is Franciabigio’s portrait of Jacopo Cennini with his keys and pruning tools, dated 1523 (fig. 1).²⁶ Vasari calls him a ‘lavatore e fattore di Pier Francesco de’ Medici’, but if he was a factor (‘fattore’) of the Medici then he managed the Medici vineyards, olive groves and quarry at Fiesole, in which case the keys are more significant than the pruning tools, just as in Moroni’s portrait the sword belt is more significant than the shears as an index of the sitter’s status as somewhat higher than has usually been supposed.

If it were modest not to wear a sword when one had the right to do so, then it was still more modest to be depicted holding shears when there was no need to do so, for if the right to carry arms was an assertion that one had a name and family honour to defend, then the handling of tools and the business of cutting limited one’s status no less decisively. Thus in Genoa in the second half of the sixteenth century a citizen engaged in the wholesale cloth trade could be enrolled as a noble, but the retail trade and manual labour (including ‘weighing, cutting and measuring’) could disqualify an applicant. Painters were highly sensitive to such distinctions and Peter Lukehart (to whom I am also indebted for this information about Genoa) has plausibly suggested that the painter Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554–1627), whose family had been enrolled in the Genoese nobility in 1567 and whose father seems to have regarded painting as a manual trade, was perhaps provoked into murdering Cristoforo Fronte in 1581 when this wealthy silk merchant proposed to have one of Paggi’s paintings measured as a means of appraising its value.²⁷

Significantly it is Moroni, in his portrait of Alessandro Vittoria (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), who provides what is probably the only Renaissance image of a great artist that emphasises the dignity of manual labour: the sculptor displays a bare forearm.

Provenance

See above. Casa Grimani at S. Maria Formosa before 1660. With Natale or Felice Schiavoni by 1845, from whom acquired by Federico Frizzoni de Salis in 1846. Sold by the latter to Sir Charles Eastlake for the National Gallery in October 1862; received in the Gallery on 7 February 1863, hung on 17 April 1863.²⁸

Etching

Etching by Paul Edmé Le Rat (1849–1892) for Etchings from the National Gallery, London 1876.

Version/Copy

A version of this painting – presumably a copy – is in the possession of Samar Bikram Shah, son of HH Pratap Shah, Maharaja of Garhwal, India.²⁹

Exhibition and Loans

Cheltenham 1915–18, Municipal Art Gallery and Museum ; London 1978, National Gallery (12) ; Stockholm 2000, National Museum (291).

Framing

The painting is in a carved and gilded frame of reverse profile with a narrow wreath at the sight edge, bordered by scrolling pierced leaves (fig. 3). This is of a seventeenth‐ or early eighteenth‐century Italian pattern, similar to some in the Museo Davia‐Bargellini, Bologna, believed to be Emilian, although it may have been made in the nineteenth century.³⁰ It was purchased in June 1985, and replaced a frame bought [page 241]for the picture from Arnold Wiggins in July 1978, which has a reverse profile, a rolled‐leaf ornament at the sight edge, and a wreath at the back.³¹ This in its turn replaced a frame, also with a reverse profile, with a wreath at the sight edge and leaves and berries crudely carved on the flat,³² probably given to the painting in the 1930s and doubtless a replacement for the frame in which the picture was acquired or which it was given soon after acquisition.

Notes