Portrait of Francesca Sforza di Santafiora

Del Conte Jacopino

(Florence 1510 - Rome 1598)

The work is an eloquent example of the portrait production of Jacopino Del Conte, the Florentine artist active in Rome in the service of the city’s most prominent families. Appreciated by Pope Paul III, he worked above all for the Colonna and the Orsini. The present painting is in fact connected with the latter, as the subject of the portrait was recently identified as Francesca di Bosio Sforza di Santa Fiora, widow of Girolamo Orsini and mother of Paolo Giordano. The identification was made possible thanks to comparison with a replica housed in the Palazzo Sforza Cesarini in Rome, which bears an inscription with her name.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this painting is still unknown. The first mention of its connection to the Borghese Collection dates to 1693, when it was listed in the inventory of that year as ‘a painting of 5 spans on slate stone with the portrait of a woman, at no. 704, with a gilded frame, by fra’ Bastiano del Piombo’. The attribution to Sebastiano del Piombo was repeated in the Inventario Fidecommissario of 1833 and upheld by Bernard Berenson (1904); the 1790 inventory, meanwhile, had rather ascribed it to Bronzino, a name accepted by Adolfo Venturi (1893) but rejected by Federico Zeri, who proposed that of Jacopino del Conte (Zeri 1948).

The attribution of the work in question to the Tuscan painter was embraced by both Hofmeister (1954) and Paola della Pergola, who in 1959 published it under the name of Jacopino. This view was accepted by all subsequent critics (see Longhi 1967; Vannugli 1992 and 1998; Stefani 2000; Hermann Fiore 2003 and 2006) and was not called into question for decades. Recently, however, in an essay on Leonardo Grazia, who worked in Lucca, Rome and Naples, Michela Corso (2018) proposed that the painting may actually have been by the painter from Pistoia, a view shared by the present writer (Iommelli 2022).

Once again, Paola della Pergola (1959) made the first attempts to identify the subject of this portrait. Basing her suggestion on a comparison with a work by Titian held at the National Museum of Budapest (Wethey 1971; Hochmann 1995), this scholar recognised the woman as Vittoria Farnese, wife of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Her theory was accepted by Kristina Hermann Fiore in 2003 and reconfirmed in 2006. By contrast, Antonio Vannugli (1992) proposed that the portrait depicts Livia Colonna, an idea which is corroborated by the similarity between this painting and a print that accompanied the work Rime di diversi ecc. autori in vita e in morte dell’ill.ma S.a Livia Colonna, an anthology of poetry published in Rome in 1555. A recent discovery, however, disproves both of these hypotheses: a replica of the portrait in question, now preserved in Palazzo Sforza Cesarini in Rome, contains a scroll with the name of the subject, namely Francesca di Bosio Sforza di Santa Fiora, mother of Paolo Giordano I, future husband of Isabella de’ Medici. As the veil that she wears shows, at the time of the portrait Francesca was a widow, her husband Girolamo Orsini having died in 1540.

Both the support material and dimensions of this work are the same as those of the lost Portrait of Giulia Gonzaga, which once belonged to the Borghese Collection (inv. no. 79). These particulars, together with the fact that the two paintings have also been associated with one another, suggest that they may have come from the same collection, perhaps forming part of a wider series of portraits of beautiful, famous women, which, as is well known, were painted by established artists and reproduced in series for the most important collections of the era. According to the present writer (Iommelli 2022), the two works may have come from the collection of Camilla Orsini, widow of Marcantonio Borghese, who retired to a Roman convent following her husband’s death. Camilla was in fact the niece of Paolo Giordano I Orsini, who in turn was the son of Francesca Sforza di Santa Fiora; she may have received the portrait of her distant relative as an inheritance, which for its genre, dimensions and support material is the pendant of the portrait of the beautiful Gonzaga: as the two women were considered models of virtue for unfortunate widows of the time, they were dear to Princess Orsini.

Regarding the period of its execution, in 1970 Cheney proposed the approximate date of 1546, while Kristina Hermann Fiore (2003) extended the timeframe to 1560, suggesting that the portrait in question was contemporary with Bronzino’s production.

Antonio Iommelli