An unpublished painting by Andrea del Sarto (Florence, 1486-1530), recently rediscovered and identified in the USA in an Italian-American collection, goes to auction at Sotheby’s on Thursday 27 January in New York. It is a Portrait of a Gentleman (possibly Ottaviano de ‘Medici), wearing a large hat, with a box of wax seals resting on a ledge in front of him. The work is estimated at between 2 and 3 million dollars. In the past centuries present in an aristocratic collection in Naples, the painting was brought by the same owner family to New York where they emigrated in 1908 and then passed on to the descendants who have now decided to put it up for sale. After the departures of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael from Florence in 1508, Andrea del Sarto emerged as the preeminent painter of the city. Prolific as a painter of frescoes and panel paintings, and also as a draftsman, Andrea del Sarto produced a small number of portraits over the course of his thirty-year career, although this was not the main focus of his activity. This singular specimen which goes up for auction in New York is a major new addition to his oeuvre and significantly increases the modest body of his portraits.
“The portrait is autographed”
Its authorship has been confirmed by Professor Sydney Freedberg, an eminent expert on the artist, who considers it “an autograph portrait of Andrea del Sarto of the highest quality” (letter to the owner, dated January 14, 1991). Despite this authoritative approval and its evident significance – both as a newly discovered work by the artist and as a notable addition to the inventory of Florentine male portraits of the early sixteenth century by artists such as Franciabigio, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Giuliano Bugiardini, Francesco Granacci and Sarto himself – the Portrait of a gentleman remained unknown to this day. On stylistic grounds, the portrait can be dated to the mid-1520s, making it a mature work of the last decade of the Florentine artist’s life (he died of the plague in 1530.) This was a period of intense activity: in those years it was absorbed from the ongoing campaign to fresco the Scalzo Cloister with monochrome scenes from the life of San Giovanni Battista, patron saint of Florence – one of the most significant undertakings of his career – and the monumental Last Supper in the refectory of San Salvi, a monastic church at the time on the outskirts of Florence. Internal evidence supports the proposed chronology for the portrait. The character’s clothing, in particular the wide-brimmed hat and the tunic with a voluminous upper sleeve, here worn under a cloak, indicates a dating to the years around 1520.