The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York acquires portrait by Orazio Borgianni

1 July 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has acquired a head study by Orazio Borgianni (Rome, 1578 to 1616).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has acquired a head study by Orazio Borgianni (Rome, 1578 to 1616). The painting passed through the collection of a Roman noble family and then the Neapolitan dealers La Pinacoteca, and was first published in 2001 by Marco Gallo, who gave it to Borgianni, an attribution that has held.

The sitter has not been identified with certainty. One possibility is Vittoria Campiglia, whose portrait Borgianni bequeathed to her son, his pupil Pietro Campiglia. The pose, however, is not that of a formal portrait, and Gallo argues instead that the painting is a study for a larger composition, worked with unusual force. The head may have been intended for a Saint Elizabeth or a Saint Anne, and Gallo compares it with the Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth, Saint John and an Angel in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, and with the three versions of the Holy Family with Saint Anne, two in British private collections and the third at the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, Florence.