The Saviour

Attributed to Venusti Marcello

(Como c. 1515 - Rome 1579)

This panel may have once formed part of the rich estate of Fulvio Orsini. Critics have ascribed it to Marcello Venusti, the painter from the Valtellina who was stylistically close to Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo; Marcello was active in Rome in the workshop Perin del Vaga, a follower of Raphael. The work depicts the head of the Saviour and probably formed the pendant of a lost portrait of the Virgin.

Object details

Commentary

Paola della Pergola (1959) once proposed that the painting came into the Borghese Collection through the estate of Cardinal Antonio Maria Salviati, who possessed a similar oval portrait as well as a Head of the Virgin Mary; both works, she claimed, were purchased from the painter Antonio Mariani, as indicated in a receipt dated 1612 (in the ‘Artisan Receipts’ of the Salviati archives, 1612, cited in Della Pergola 1959). Nonetheless, in light of the absence of other information and the success with which these two images met, this hypothesis seems uncertain, especially when we consider that the Salviati collection did not come into the possession of the Borghese family until 1794 (Costamagna 2001).

By contrast, Francesca Parrilla (2014) proposed that the panel may have come from the collection of Fulvio Orsini (1529-1600) through the Aldobrandini family, in whose inventory of 1624 it is first cited. From there it could have entered the Borghese Collection as part of the estate of Olimpia Aldobrandini: indeed it was Della Pergola herself who noted the presence of this Saviour in the 1693 inventory (Inv. 1693; Della Pergola 1964).

Inventories and critics of the 18th and 19th centuries attributed the work to a variety of artists:  the divine Raphael (Inv. 1700), Federico Zuccari (Inv. 1790), Paris Bordon (Inventario Fidecommissario 1833; Giovanni Piancastelli 1891), and Giulio Clovio (Adolfo Venturi 1893). Roberto Longhi (1928) was the first to make the definitive attribution to Marcello Venusti. His view was first called into question by Paola della Pergola (1959) but then later confirmed by her and successive critics (Della Pergola 1964; Herrmann Fiore 2006; Parrilla 2014 and 2019).

In this regard, it is interesting to note Parrilla’s interpretation of the 19th-century attribution of this Saviour to Bordon. In her view (2014; 2019), this idea is explained by Venusti’s marked interest in Venetian painting, and in particular in Titian, whose works he copied on numerous occasions, absorbing his compositional arrangements and tones of lighting. This quite credible reading of the context of the painting allows us to connect it to other works made by Venusti for the Farnese, for which he perhaps drew inspiration from a prototype by Titian in the Della Rovere collections; it further clarifies its provenance from the Orsini family, as Fulvio was one of those closest to Cardinal Alessandro, in particular from 1544.

Antonio Iommelli