Portrait of a Boy
Biagio d'Antonio·c. 1476/1480
Historical Context
This Portrait of a Boy by Biagio d'Antonio (c. 1476-1480) is a charming example of Florentine Renaissance child portraiture from the circle of Verrocchio and the young Leonardo. Biagio d'Antonio was a Florentine painter active in the workshops that dominated the city's artistic production in the late fifteenth century, contributing to major commissions including work in the Sistine Chapel. Child portraits were relatively rare in the Renaissance, and this one reflects the growing interest in individual identity and family commemoration that characterized Florentine bourgeois culture.
Technical Analysis
The oil and tempera on poplar panel demonstrates the transitional technique of late quattrocento Florence, combining traditional tempera methods with the newer oil medium, resulting in the smooth surfaces and precise contours characteristic of Florentine workshop production.
Provenance
(Walter Schnackenberg, Munich), by April 1925.[1] (F. Kleinberger, Paris and New York), by 1927.[2] Private collection, New York.[3] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Florence), by 1929;[4] sold 26 June 1935 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[5] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] According to a hand-written notes by Bernard Berenson on the back of a photograph of the painting in the I Tatti archive in Florence (copy in NGA curatorial files). [2] Kleinberger lent the painting to a 1927 exhibition at The Lotos Club. [3] Raimond Van Marle, _The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting_, The Hague, 1931: 13:180, fig. 119, relates that he saw the painting "in a private collection in New York," but does not specify when. [4] An opinion written by Roberto Longhi and dated October 1929 was addressed to Contini Bonacossi (copy and translation in NGA curatorial files). [5] The bill of sale was for seven paintings and a number of decorative art objects; NGA 1939.1.179 was identified as "Florentine about 1475" (copy in NGA curatorial files). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1662.
