No, these aren't the caricature mentioned, but they're also by Titian (and/or his assistants), and they're on the back of the Ancona Pala Gozzi.
In the latest issue of the scholarly journal Artibus et Historiae, I have an article on a caricature found on the back of a Titian canvas, seemingly depicting Michelangelo. It’s fairly speculative, I suppose, but that’s the nature of such things, and in any case it engages a number of issues — caricature, cartooning, the grotesque — that have been chronically under-examined in the history of art and the humanities in general. Oh, there’s also an extensive excursus on Pope Julius II’s beard, and Raphael and Leonardo are implicated…
Here’s the abstract:
The article examines drawings found on the back of the canvas of the recently surfaced Portrait of a Man (Girolamo Cornaro?) painted by Titian around 1511–1512. Drawn with the point of the brush, they depict a large head in profi le and two smaller figures. Loose and broad in execution, at least the former belongs to the domain of caricature. By comparison with similar drawings, on paper as well as the versos of other paintings, the drawings are here attributed to Titian. Further, the possibility that the head might be a portrayal of Michelangelo is explored, as is its value as evidence of the reception of Michelangelo’s outsize public stature and self-fashioning as an imperfect, Socratic artist whose work carried palpable overtones of the grotesque. The two figure studies, in themselves acutely Michelangelesque, are related to inventions by other contemporaries. Next, the fact that the caricature wears a beard, but no moustache, occasions an excursus on contemporary facial hair generally and specifically that of Michelangelo’s patron, Julius II. Ecclesiastical beards were a controversial issue at the time, and shaving one’s upper lip carried liturgical significance. Julius was the fi rst Renaissance pope to grow a beard, as is famously charted by Raphael in his portraits of him in the Vatican frescoes and elsewhere. By focusing on the depiction of his beard, the article sheds new light on the iconography of these pictures and potentially their confused chronology. Lastly, Titian’s drawings are examined in the context of contemporary grotesques with reference to Leonardo’s explorations of exaggerated physiognomies. On this basis, it proposes a reevaluation of Renaissance caricature.
The issue is second of two dedicated to Professor Peter Humfrey in his retirement. I am very happy to thus take part in the celebration!
Artibus et Historiae vol. 68 is available now in a specialist library near you!
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New articles on Titian, Sebastiano, Michelangelo, Raphael!
I’ve recently had a couple of scholarly articles published in two anthology volumes. I hope you will check them out.
One is a treatment, my most comprehensive yet, of Titian’s engagement with reproductive printmaking, from his scattered interactions with printmakers working after his designs and finished works in the earlier parts of his career, his involvement in Venetian literary circles from the later 1520s onwards and its manifestation in book illustration and print portraiture, to his increased collaboration with printers and printmakers issuing prints after his paintings from the 1550s onwards, culminating in his famous work with Cornelis Cort in the mid 1560s through 1571.
The article is included in the anthology Titian: Themes and Variations, edited by the great Peter Humfrey. It compiles new scholarship on Titian’s practice of replication and variation throughout his career and across media, written by many of the top scholars in the field. I’m honoured to be included.
The other article was developed from a conference paper I gave during covid for a Roman conference on Raphael in 2021, postponed like so many other things involving Raphael, from the anniversary year of 2020. It examines the close creative exchange, competition and mutual inspiration between Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo in Rome during the second decade of the sixteenth century and beyond. I have new things to say about Raphael’s appropriations from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his and Sebastiano’s race to complete mural paintings in oil, the internal chronology of their respective renditions of the Transfiguration of Christ and a proposal about Michelangelo’s contribution to Sebastiano’s never-complete altarpiece for the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria della Pace.
It is published in the volume Himmlische und irdische Liebe: Ein anderer Blick auf Raffael, edited by Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, Claudia Bertling Biaggini, Claudia Cieri Via, a rich compendium of work by a wide variety of scholars on this crucial period in the history of modern Western art.
Do take a look at either or both when you’re next at your academic library. I also recommend getting them for your own bookshelves of course, but realise that that is a longer shot.