Page 246 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

indicate that the author was the much-traveled ties were consistent with the sophisticated content son 1978), but it is possible that Jacopo's style
Venetian artist Jacopo de' Barbari at the age of of the picture. In an address to Frederick the Wise some six years before his first certain works was
twenty. However, there has been some difficulty of Saxony he insisted that an artist must be versed itself similar to Vivarini's. On balance, the attri-
in reconciling this picture with Jacopo's known in the liberal arts: "first geometry and then arith- bution to Jacopo seems acceptable.
style, and the status of the inscription has been metic, which are both necessary for measurement The identity of Luca's young companion (and
doubted on technical grounds, since it does not and proportions, because there cannot be propor- pupil?) has proved elusive. An inventory of 1631
appear in the X-ray of the panel and may have tion wihout number, nor can there be form with- records a lost inscription, "Divo principi Guido,"
been a much later addition (Naples and Rome out geometry" (Servolini 1944,105-106). The referring to Duke Federigo da Montefeltro's son,
1983). Against these doubts, we can point to the publication of Luca's Summa in Venice in 1494 Guidobaldo, who was born in 1472 and was to die
elusive nature of Jacopo's artistic personality, to would have provided both a reason and an oppor- in 1508. Guidobaldo was the dedicatee of Luca's
the absence of any certain works before 1500 (the tunity for Jacopo to have painted the portrait in Summa and the recipient of Piero della Frances-
year of the great View of Venice (cat. 151) and the Venice, which in turn suggests that the damaged ca's treatise on the regular solids, the Libellus de
Saint Oswald), and to the fact that the white lead date on the cartellino originally read "1494." The quinque corporibus regularibus (Daly Davis
of the cartellino is impervious to X-rays and thus best alternative suggestions of a painter for the 1977). However, it would hardly be fitting for a
precludes any chance of the lettering's being vis- Naples picture have drawn parallels with portraits duke to play such a secondary role in the painting,
ible. We know that Jacopo's intellectual propensi- by Alvise Vivarini and his Venetian circle (Leven- and there is little reliable evidence of Guidobaldo's

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 245