Portrait of an Actor

Provenance

The first record of Fetti's portrait is a 1653 inventory of Cardinal Mazarin's collection at the Palais Mazarin in Paris, where it is described as "Harlequin, sur toile, par Fety [Harlequin, on canvas, by Fetti]". An inventory drawn up after the Cardinal's death in 1661 lists it as item 1266: "Un autre faict par Fety (1), sur toile, représentant Harlequin, comédien, tenant un masque [Another work by Fetti (1), representing Harlequin, actor, holding a mask]". The painting was later in the collection of Pierre Crozat and reproduced as Portrait de Comédien, an engraving by Nicolas de Larmessin in the Recueil Crozat (1729), where it is noted that the actor had been in the service of the Duke of Mantua. It is also mentioned in an inventory made after Crozat's death in 1740 and was inherited by Crozat's nephew, Louis-Antoine Crozat. It was described in a 1755 inventory as a portrait of a "Comédien la tête découverte, tenant un masque d'Arlequin; par le Feti [Actor, head uncovered, holding a Harlequin mask; by Fetti]". After the death of Louis-Antoine Crozat, it was sold by his heir in 1772 to Catherine II of Russia and is mentioned as being in the collection of the Hermitage Museum beginning in 1774.

Identification of the sitter

Since the late 19th century, the identity of the sitter in Fetti's Portrait of an Actor has been a subject of much interest and disagreement. Among the portraits painted by Fetti during his stay at the Gonzaga court of Mantua (1614–1622), few have been identified with certainty, but none of the others have engendered as much attention as this one. Pamela Askew explains: "The reason undoubtedly lies in its impressive power of characterisation and execution. In many respects [it is] the grandest and most penetrating of Fetti's portraits."

Former attributions

Eduard Safarik, author of a 1990 monograph on Fetti, lists five persons previously proposed by others as the subject of Fetti's painting: the actors Francesco Gabrielli, Giovanni Gabrielli, Giovanni Battista Andreini, and Tristano Martinelli, and the composer Claudio Monteverdi. Of these, apart from Martinelli, only two, Giovanni Gabrielli and Monteverdi gained wide currency.

Giovanni Gabrielli

Brüiningk and Somoff, editors of the 1891 catalogue of the Hermitage Museum's Gallery of Paintings, identified the subject of Fetti's portrait as the Italian commedia dell'arte actor Giovanni Gabrielli, whom they equated with the much younger subject in Annibale Carracci's Portrait of a Lute Player (c. 1600). The three-way correlation of Fetti's Actor and Annibale's Lute Player with Agostino Carracci's engraved Giovanni Gabrielli (c. 1599) was traced by Denis Mahon, who questioned it in 1947. The errors were compounded in 1962, when Henner Menz, director of the Dresden Gallery, where Annibale's painting is located, gave it the title Portrait of the Lute-player Giovanni Gabrielle and described it as a "picture of a musician", leading to a confusion of the actor with the similarly named Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli. These misidentifications lingered, despite Posner's outright rejection of them in 1971, when he named the subject of the Lute Player as a member of the Mascheroni family of Bologna, based on Carlo Cesare Malvasia's description of the sitter in his 1678 book Felsina Pittrice. For example, the popular book, Five Centuries of Music In Venice by H. C. Robbins Landon and John Julius Norwich, published in English, Italian, French, and Japanese, as a companion to the five-part television series Maestro, included a full-page color plate of the Lute Player as a portrait of Gabrieli the composer in 1991. In 1978 Askew strongly supported Posner's identification of the sitter as a member of the Mascheroni family, and the portrait is now believed to portray Giulio Mascheroni of Bologna.

Claudio Monteverdi

De Logu suggested the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi in 1967. However, this attribution has also been rejected.

Tristano Martinelli

Askew first suggested Tristano Martinelli in 1954 and published a detailed analysis in The Burlington Magazine in 1978. Martinelli, probably the first actor to use the name Harlequin for the masked secondo zanni role, and the most famous Harlequin up to the time of his death in 1630, commissioned numerous dramatic portraits of himself, three of which he sent to France when he was wanting to return to that country in 1626. One may have been Fetti's portrait, later acquired by Mazarin. The association of the name Martinelli with the portrait was first documented in 1912, when a copy in pastel, attributed to Fragonard (1732–1806), was sold in Paris as Portrait de l'auteur et acteur Martinelli.

Francesco Andreini

The Fetti scholar Eduard Safarik proposed the Italian actor Francesco Andreini as the subject of Fetti's portrait in 1990. Andreini began his career as the innamorato (male lover) and later became famous in the role of Capitano Spavento da Vall'Inferna. He also sometimes played the Sicilian Doctor, the shepherd Corinto, and the necromancer Falsirone. Safarik's attribution is based on a comparison of Fetti's portrait (and a drawing, presumably a study for the portrait) to the frontispiece of Andreini's Le Bravure di Capitano Spavento, engraved by Abraham Tummerman and first published in 1609 in Venice. The Hermitage painting was shown with the title Portrait of Fancesco Andreini at a 1996 exhibit (organized by Safarik) at the Palazzo Te in Mantua.

Museum attributions

In 2015 the curators of the Hermitage Museum identified the subject of Fetti's painting as either Tristano Martinelli or Francesco Andreini, but these attributions were subsequently removed. The British Museum, which has a print of the engraving from the Recueil Crozat (1729), identified the subject as Francesco Andreini.