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Paris Bordone

Italian, 1500 - 1571

BiographyBorn Treviso, bapt 5 July 1500; died Venice, 19 Jan 1571.

Italian painter and draughtsman. He is best known for his strikingly beautiful depictions of women, both in portraits and in cabinet paintings. He also excelled in rendering monumental architectural settings for narrative, both religious and secular, possibly initiating a genre that would find great currency during the mid-16th century, especially in Venice, France and the Netherlands. His favoured media were oil and fresco, the latter being used on both interiors and façades. Although he was not generally sought after by Venetian patrons during his career, as his art was eclipsed by that of Titian, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto, Bordone was regarded in the mid-16th century as an accomplished artist (Pino; Sansovino). He worked for the moneyed élite of northern Italy and Bavaria, for the royalty of France and Poland, and had works commissioned to be sent to Spain and to Flanders.

Despite knowledge of the important patrons for whom he worked, the chronology of Bordone’s oeuvre is by no means clear. Dating on stylistic grounds is confounded by the diverse sources on which he drew, ranging from the Emilian, Lombard and Venetian to the French and northern European, depending on the patron. Due to the ease with which prints circulated during Bordone’s career, it is difficult to ascertain whether influences were derived at first hand or from printed images. Such difficulties in assigning dates are further exacerbated by his use of the same figure study for numerous paintings evidently executed decades apart. Reliance on the testimony of Vasari, who interviewed Bordone in 1566, in conjunction with the extant documents, the few signed and dated paintings and, to a lesser extent, period fashion provides only a rough outline of his activity. Due to the lack of agreement among scholars regarding chronology, the following account is based mainly on the documentary evidence.
1. Training and early work in Venice, before 1538.

On the death of his father, Giovanni, in 1508, Paris moved with his mother, Angelica, to Venice. At school he excelled particularly in grammar and music and then entered the studio of Titian, probably in 1516. By 1518 he had become a master, although he had left Titian’s studio prematurely, evidently due to Titian’s hostility towards a student who so successfully imitated his style. The rift was apparently so great that Titian took for himself Bordone’s first Venetian commission, the altarpiece (1523) of S Niccolò dei Frari. Giorgione’s art also influenced Bordone early on, tempered by the example of other artists’ work. Bordone’s The Lovers (early 1520s; Milan, Brera), for example, exhibits a Giorgionesque mood and attendant psychology; the lovers emerge from the dark ground bathed in a soft light, while a third figure is relegated to relative obscurity in the darkness. The figural composition evidently draws on Tullio Lombardo’s marble relief of 1510 of the same subject, as well as Titian’s own Lovers (Florence, Casa Buonarroti), but Bordone added a third party. Typically he took a delight in texture and attention to detail, evident particularly in the sumptuous fabrics and gems and the soft, supple skin of figures that are imbued also with a Raphaelesque elegance and grace. The subject-matter itself looks forward to the conflation of portraiture and allegory that characterizes much of his mature work.

In Bordone’s early religious paintings comparable artistic influences are evident. Giorgione’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS George and Francis (c. 1500; Castelfranco Veneto, S Liberale), executed for a condottiere (Tuzio Costanzo), provided Bordone with both a compositional and a stylistic guide for his Virgin with SS Christopher and George (c. 1524–6; Lovere, Gal. Accad. B.A. Tadini) for S Agostino, Crema, also commissioned by a condottiere, Giulio Manfron (d 1526). Typically, Bordone did not copy Giorgione slavishly; he enlivened the older master’s composition in a manner evocative of both Titian and Pordenone, Titian’s greatest rival in Venice. The figure of St George, a portrait of Giulio Manfron, stands in a relaxed but relatively static pose, while St Christopher, protector from violent deaths, such as Manfron was to suffer, emerges from the water with a forceful torsion reminiscent of Titian’s and Pordenone’s figures; the Virgin twists lest she let go of her son, recalling the sense of movement in Titian’s figures of the Virgin; and the angels holding the cloth of honour evoke Raphael.

Bordone first achieved public recognition in 1534, when he won the competition of the Scuola Grande di S Marco to execute the Presentation of the Ring to the Doge (Venice, Accad.). Nepotism may have played a part in his success; Zuan Alvise Bonrizzo, Guardian Grande of the Scuola in the 1530s, was his wife’s uncle. With this painting Bordone reached artistic maturity; Vasari thought it the ‘most beautiful and most noteworthy painting ever created by Paris’. The architecture is inspired by Books II and IV of his friend Sebastiano Serlio’s unpublished treatise on architecture and follows a Venetian tradition of using detailed architectural backgrounds often not manifestly relevant to the narrative. It shows an ideal view of the renovations to the Doge’s Palace and environs planned by Doge Andrea Gritti, who is represented as the 14th-century doge Pietro Gradenigo (reg 1289–1311), as well as a view of the tower of the Madonna dell’Orto, near where Bordone lived. Bordone’s accomplished handling of the architecture may have prompted Titian’s setting in the Presentation of the Virgin (1534–8; Venice, Accad.) of the Scuola Grande della Carità. No presentation drawing or modello survives for any painting by Bordone, although a sketch of a draped male figure seen from behind (Paris, priv. col., see Rearick in 1987 symposium, fig.) can be related to the Presentation of the Ring. Executed in black chalk, heightened with white, on blue paper, the artist’s favoured method, the study relates to figures at the periphery of the canvas and exhibits the use of parallel hatching and the energetic touch that characterize much of Bordone’s Titianesque draughtsmanship.
2. Middle period, 1538–c. 1550.

Success in the competition of 1534 did not lead to further important Venetian commissions for Bordone. In 1539 he lost a competition for a Marriage of the Virgin for the Scuola Grande della Carità to another follower of Titian, Gian Pietro Silvio (d 1552). He had already begun to look elsewhere for patrons. He was absent from Venice from March 1538 until April 1539, and, according to Vasari, he travelled to Fontainebleau in 1538 to work at the court of Francis I, where he executed a large number of paintings including portraits of women. Among these commissions Vasari mentioned a cabinet picture of Venus and Cupid (perhaps Warsaw, N. Mus.) executed for the Duc de Guise (?Claude I, 1496–1550); and an Ecce homo (untraced) and Jupiter with Io for Cardinal de Lorraine (?Jean de Lorraine 1498–1550), generally identified as the signed but undated Jupiter with Io (Göteborg, Kstmus.). The work exhibits Bordone’s synthesis of the Venetian, Central Italian and French Mannerist sensibilities, probably inspired by such followers of Raphael as Luca Penni and Francesco Primaticcio, as well as the more Michelangelesque Rosso Fiorentino, who were also in the employ of the French king. The monumental figures of Jupiter and Io embrace amid the clouds, watched by Jupiter’s eagle, while Juno rushes to the scene in her chariot. The soft, luminous flesh of the Brera Lovers is here given a more polished and pristine veneer, and the moody atmosphere, reminiscent of Giorgione, becomes a brighter, more refined ambience wholly in keeping with the courtly Mannerist style. Bordone’s attention to detail and texture remains, but the glistening pearls on Io’s tiara, her loosely flowing tresses (generally reserved for courtesans and maidens in 16th-century painting) and the delicacy and tactile quality of each fibre of her untied undergarment contribute to the preciosity and titillating nature of the scene.

On his return from France, Bordone embarked on an extensive fresco cycle for Santa Croce in Pialdier (Belluno) and continued to paint portraits, for which he was by this time apparently well known. The portrait of Jerome Krafft, signed and dated 1540 (Paris, Louvre), together with evidence of Bordone’s absence from Venice from November 1540 to April 1543, has been used to date the artist’s trip to Bavaria. The documents presented by Fossaluzza (1982), however, suggest that the portrait was painted in Venice and that Bordone was in Milan during the early 1540s in the employ of Carlo da Rho (d 1552). In the chapel of S Jeronimo in S Maria presso S Celso, Milan, Bordone painted the altarpiece of a Holy Family with St Jerome and Angels, with a predella of a Sleeping St Roch Visited by Angels as well as a frescoed lunette representing God the Father Surrounded by Angels, works that exhibit his continuing debt to Titian. Bordone received payment for work on the chapel in July 1542, and by 1543 he is again documented in Venice. He seems to have remained in the Veneto until the autumn of 1548, although the possibility that in the interim he travelled to Augsburg cannot be discounted altogether. On 22 November 1548 he is documented in Milan, where he remained until c. 1550–51. At this time he worked again for Carlo da Rho and his consort, Paola Visconti, and executed a group of paintings with secular and religious subjects as well as portraits. The portrait of Carlo has not been identified, but that of Paola Visconti (ex-Pal. Real, Sintra) exhibits a new influence from the Lombard school, particularly of Moretto. A debt to Lorenzo Lotto, with whom Bordone had in 1548 been in contact in Venice, is also evident. The narrative paintings of this period continue to manifest Bordone’s synthesis of the Venetian, central Italian and French styles, especially of Raphael’s school, and include Venus and Mars under Vulcan’s Net (Berlin, Gemäldegal.) and its pendant, Bathsheba Bathing (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.), on the subject of adultery; a landscape with the Holy Family and St John the Baptist (Bonn, priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., pl. 23), which, given the collocation of mythological and biblical subject-matter in the former pair, possibly formed a pendant to a pagan subject; as well as a nocturnal Baptism of Christ (Milan, Brera), possibly also a pendant to another unknown work. While in Milan, Bordone was also commissioned by Candiano, the Milanese physician to Mary, Queen of Hungary and Regent of the Netherlands, to execute a St Mary Magdalene in the Desert with Angels and a Diana Bathing with Nymphs (both untraced) as presents for the Queen. He also painted a number of Ovidian myths for the Marchese d’Astorga. These are thought to include a Rape of Proserpina (untraced), a Rape of Europa (Breda di Piave, Antonio Zangrando priv. col.) and a Venus and Anchises (Paris, Louvre). Bordone also seems to have painted a Jupiter with a Nymph for the King of Poland (either Sigismund I or II) at this time, or possibly slightly later, c. 1551–2, when he painted a portrait of the King’s Veronese jeweller, Gian Jacopo Caraglio (Kraków, N. A. Cols) in Italy.
See also Frame, fig.
3. Late works, after c. 1550.

If Bordone did not go to Augsburg in the 1540s, he could not have travelled there until, at the earliest, December 1552. About 1550 he executed an extensive fresco cycle at S Simon di Vallada, Venice, which exhibits an influence of Leonardo and his Milanese school; in 1551 he painted an altarpiece of the Sacred Mysteries for Treviso Cathedral, commissioned by Canon Andrea Salomon; he is documented as being in Treviso on 22–23 November 1552; and he executed several paintings, one on an extremely large scale, while in Bavaria at work for the Fugger family and an undocumented Prineri family, indicating a rather lengthy sojourn there. Garas dated the Bavarian stay to around 1550–60 and suggested that Bordone executed a series of six paintings for a room in the palace of one of his Bavarian patrons: a Venus and Cupid and its pendant, Diana the Huntress with Nymphs (both ex-Gemäldegal., Dresden); Venus, Mars, Cupid and Victory and Mars Taking Cupid’s Bow with Venus and Flora (both Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.); Apollo, Midas and Pan (Dresden, Gemäldegal.) and an untraced panel with two unidentified female figures. The theme seems to concern love and marriage (e.g. Venus wears red, symbolizing love, and Victory holds the myrtle of marriage), yet the two figures of Mars differ substantially in age and appearance, suggesting either that there are problems in the reconstruction or that the paintings were intended to be viewed in pairs, rather than as a coherent programme. Vasari also mentioned that Bordone created a cabinet picture in the possession of the Cardinal of Augsburg, Otto Truchsess von Waldberg (1514–73), and ‘a painting with all five orders of architecture’ for the Prineri family, once identified as Augustus and the Sibyl (Moscow, Obraztsov Col., see Formicheva, 1971, fig.), but—given the French provenance of the latter work (traceable to the 17th century) and probable execution in France—now generally identified as the Combat of Gladiators (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) once attributed to Raphael’s student Giulio Romano. For the Combat Bordone drew on Serlio once again, this time on Book III, but he accentuated the importance of the architecture by the use of diminutive figures; the painting probably has political overtones.

Of the many problems connected with the chronology of Bordone’s works, the most contentious concerns a trip to the court of Francis II (reg 1559–60) at Fontainebleau in 1559. Federici (1803) found an encomium (untraced) written in 1559 by the Trevisan lawyer and humanist Prospero Aproino (d 1611) in honour of the departure of his city’s most famed artist for France. Other peripheral documents have recently been used, with external evidence, to argue a case for a single French sojourn in 1559; for two French sojourns; and for a single trip in 1538. Were the trip to have occurred in 1559, then the Venus and Cupid, Ecce homo, Jupiter with Io and Augustus and the Sibyl, mentioned above, would all have to be dated some 20 years later than Vasari’s testimony. Since documents reveal that from 1557–8 Bordone was at work on an altarpiece of the Virgin Presenting St Dominic to the Saviour (Milan, Brera), as well as a Resurrection and Saints with Angels (untraced) for the monastery of S Paolo in Treviso (destr. after 1810), and that in 1561 he was working for the monastery of Ognissanti in Treviso, then the possibility remains that in between Bordone was in France.

After 1560 Bordone worked at his Venetian studio, but his important commissions came from Treviso, not from Venice. This patronage derived from religious institutions, and, with the exception of portraits, he seems to have spent the remaining years of his life painting altarpieces exhibiting a somewhat repetitive formal repertory, a tendency to which he was inclined throughout his life, given his habit of repeating figure studies from his own model-book. In the signed and dated SS Lawrence, Jerome, Peter, John the Baptist and Sebastian (1562; ex-S Lorenzo, Treviso; now Treviso Cathedral), he not only repeated figures within the same composition, but reduced them to virtual petrifaction.

Corinne Mandel. "Bordone, Paris." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T010089 (accessed March 22, 2012).

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