(Venice circa 1490/1500–1551)
Portrait of a man, half-length, holding a letter,
oil on canvas, 86.5 x 79 cm, framed

Provenance:
art market, Italy;
Private European collection

Literature:
F. Caroli, Un nuovo ritratto di Girolamo Savoldo, in: Notizie da Palazzo Albani, vol. 19, 1990, no. 1, pp. 41–44 (as Girolamo Savoldo);
F. Frangi, Savoldo. Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence 1992, p. 148, no. 4A (under ‘Opere discusse’)

We are grateful to Mauro Lucco for suggesting the attribution after examining the present painting in the original.

This portrait of a gentleman has recently been reassigned to the catalogue of the rare Venetian painter Giovanni Pietro Silvio and can be compared to the signed and dated portrait of a man holding a letter, conserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (dated 1542, inv. no. 1537).

In 1990, Caroli published the present painting as a work by Girolamo Savoldo, suggesting a date of around 1520, and drew particular attention to the rendering of the hand ‘resolved with an accomplished, proto-caravaggist realism’ (see literature).

Giovanni Pietro Silvio was active in Venice and the Veneto area from the 1530s onwards. Stylistically, his work can be compared to Palma il Vecchio, Paris Bourdon, Lorenzo Lotto, Girolamo Savoldo, Alessandro Bonvicino and above all, Titian, whose pupil he may have been (see G. Scirè, Appunti sul Silvio, in: Arte veneta, XXIII, Venezia 1969, p. 211). His first work, documented to 1532, was the altar of Saint Martin enthroned with Saints Peter and Paul for the Cathedral of Piove di Sacco near Padua. Other known works of his include the altarpiece in San Zeno in Aviano and in the church of San Vendemiano near Treviso, as well as the Christ and the woman taken in adultery in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (inv. no. 196).