Catalogue entry no. 42 by William W. Robinson:
In October 1590, Hendrick Goltzius, the internationally famous engraver of virtuoso prints such as The Great Hercules, left Haarlem for Rome. Traveling across Germany and Italy, he stopped in Munich, Venice, Bologna, and Florence before arriving in Rome in January 1591. He departed in August, returning to Haarlem by the same route. Karel van Mander, biographer and close friend of Goltzius, reported that he “was recognized . . . by the artists [in Rome], the most renowned of whom he portrayed with cryons, as he also did in Florence, Venice, and in Germany.” Van Mander singled out two of these drawings: one depicted the Munich painter Christoph Schwarz; the other, the Roman artist Girolamo Muziano. The term cryons in this context probably denotes both natural and fabricated chalks, although elsewhere Van Mander used it specifically to describe fabricated colored chalks or pastels. In his Lives of 1642, the Italian artist and biographer Giovanni Baglione wrote that in Rome, Goltzius made portraits of several of his friends with watercolors on paper, but he, too, must have had in mind the portraits in colored chalks. Baglione cited one example, which represented the Flemish miniaturist Frans van de Casteele (Francesco da Castello).
Goltzius’s likenesses of Muziano, Schwarz, and Van de Casteele are lost or remain unidentified, but eight of the large, bust-length portrait drawings he produced in Munich and Italy in 1590–91, including Harvard’s Portrait of a Man, have survived. All are executed predominantly in red and black chalk. Through stumping and additions in white, brown, and ocher chalks, red and white opaque watercolor, and gray and brown washes, Goltzius depicted his subjects’ faces, eyes, and hair with a naturalism and pictorial breadth unprecedented in European portrait drawings. His likeness of Frans van de Casteele, wrote Baglione, was “assai naturale, che pareva vivo, tanto era ben rappresentato” (very natural, he seemed alive, he was so well represented).
The identifiable sitters in the surviving portraits, like those recorded by Baglione and Van Mander, are all artists. With the exception of one German (Schwarz) and two Italians (Muziano and Jacopo Palma il Giovane), the subjects are Netherlanders who pursued their careers in Munich (Jan Sadeler), Venice (Dirck de Vries), Florence (Jan van der Straet, Giovanni da Bologna, Pietro Franqueville), and Rome (Da Castello). As Emil Reznicek suggested, the unidentified man in the Harvard portrait might also be an artist of northern European origin. Goltzius executed at least one large, close-up portrait drawing in colored chalks before he left for Italy. Dated 1588, it too depicts a fellow artist, the printmaker Gillis van Breen. During the years immediately after he returned to Haarlem, he drew two self-portraits and two portraits of artists that are similar in format, media, and technique to those produced in Italy. Alison Kettering has convincingly associated all these works with the tradition of friendship portraits—drawings made to memorialize personal encounters and/or to present as gifts—which accounts in part for their immediacy, informality, and “mimetic virtuosity.”
The Harvard drawing has been cut out around the contours of the head, collar, and bust and mounted on a secondary support. The black-chalk and gray-wash background and black-ink borderline are not original and were presumably added when the portrait was silhouetted and mounted. Part of the mounting sheet has been scraped away to reveal the verso of the original drawing, which bears inscriptions in three brown inks, including Goltzius’s monogram and, in a different ink, Ao. 1591. None of these annotations are in the artist’s hand. The monogram and date were probably transcribed when the drawing was silhouetted and remounted, presumably recording an original monogram and date that were lost when the sheet was trimmed.
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