This bust-length portrait of a bearded man, possibly a prelate, was thought to have been painted by the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556) when Percy S. Straus acquired it from Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi in 1925. Straus, ever careful, consulted Bernard Berenson, who accepted this attribution, as did numerous other art historians. However, their opinions were disputed by more recent scholars such as Rodolfo Pallucchini, Giordana Mariani Canova, and Carolyn C. Wilson, who not only questioned the attribution, but also the sixteenth-century date suggested by the earlier scholars.¹ The exhibition Lorenzo Lotto Portraits, organized by the Museo del Prado and the National Gallery, London, which recently reassessed Lotto’s prowess as a portraitist and reignited the interest in this exceptional Venetian artist, did not include this work,² nor will Enrico dal Pozzolo include it in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Lotto’s works. He fundamentally agrees with Wilson’s assessment that it cannot be by Lorenzo Lotto.³

The original attribution was based on the similarity of this work with a portrait of Bishop Tommaso Negri (1527, fig. 21.1) by Lotto. This signed and dated work, which had remained for nearly four hundred years in the Franciscan convent in Poljud, near Split, Croatia, where the bishop spent his last years, shows an elderly, bearded man, wearing a biretta, very much like the sitter in the Straus painting. The similarity led to speculation that the present work could have been a preliminary study for the finished painting, but on closer inspection, and with the insights provided by X-ray and infrared reflectography, this superficial similarity is not sufficient for an attribution. The handling of light as well as the highly differentiated brushwork of the Negri portrait, the finesse with which the long, full beard is evoked, and the almost pre-Impressionist manner with which the hands are loosely brushed go well beyond the present work.⁴ Therefore, the question of who the author might have been remains open at this time. If, as Wilson suggests, it was painted during the seventeenth century or even later, the field of possible artists is vast.

—Helga Kessler Aurisch