18

The story of the painting in the collection

It is likely that the portrait remained in Francesco Bembo’s ownership until his
dramatic end. It is then thought to have gone, possibly directly, into the collection
 of Bartolomeo della Nave, as it appears in the list of paintings drawn up
after the collector’s death

(1632).44

Della Nave’s paintings were bought by the
Duke of Hamilton between 1636 and 1638 and after his death went with the rest
of his collection into that of Erzherzog Leopold Wilhelm in 1649. The 1659 inventory
 records, at number 303 of the Italian paintings, »a portrait in oil on
canvas, a lady in a black dress with gold and silver embroiderings, with a big
triple string of pearls around her neck, a red carnation between her breasts and
a pear-shaped pearl on her forehead and in her ear. In a gilt frame,

[...].45

By an
unknown

painter«.46

Knowledge of the painter and the subject portrayed had
been lost over the course of about twenty years. The poor legibility of the signature,
 virtually invisible to the naked eye, which was not even noted by those who
drew up the Delle Nave and Hamilton lists, explains the uncertainty of the writer
 of Leopold Wilhelm’s inventory and the subsequent developments in the story
of its attribution.

Another stage in the process of losing knowledge about it is recorded by the
illustrated inventory by Storffer mentioned above. Here it is classified as a work
by Bartholomeus Spranger portraying the artist’s

wife.47

The attribution to Rudolf’s
 court painter is not particularly surprising though, considering the main
characteristics of Gaetano’s portraiture, so precise and skilled in the painting of

Ultramarine

Ultramarine is produced from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone mainly
found in present-day Afghanistan. The stone was imported to Europe
where it was ground to produce this extremely expensive pigment. In artists’
 receipts listing materials the price of ultramarine equalled that of
gold. Artists used ultramarine to create an unmistakable brilliant cold
blue. Ultramarine was usually mixed with white and applied in thin layers,
 frequently over underpainting comprising other (cheaper) blue pigments.
 Applied in thick layers and with an oily binder is appears dark,
almost black. Synthetic Ultramarine was first produced in the middle of
the

19th

century.

Elke Oberthaler