The first renaissance centurion: the National Gallery of Scotland's new exhibition of Venetian renaissance art in Scottish collections includes a major rediscovery, a painting by Paris Bordon from Mount Stuart, Alexandra Jackson discusses its place in Venetian art, and studies the limited evidence for its date, patronage and provenance

Apollo, August, 2004 by Alexandra Jackson

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The Centurion and the style of Bordon's late paintings

Bordon seems to have used four different types of sword hilt designs in his works, two of which (in his Mythologies) may be traced to Folios 117 and 120 in the Wolfenbuttel pattern book, and the fourth is the cutlass discussed above. An examination of the other works that contain this curved sword reveals that besides the Battle of the Gladiators, generally dated to around 1560, and believed to be an impetus for Antoine Caron's Massacre paintings of the 1560s, there are four other pictures that have also been allotted to this later period in his career. These are the Stuttgart Resurrection (Fig. 15), the stylistically unnerving Resurrection in the Museo Civico in Treviso, which Eugenio Manzato has dated to 1555 57 (44) but which must be assigned with his other late and weak works for the Trevigian convent of the Ognissanti (45) (where, according to Ridolfi, his daughter had taken her vows), and the even more bizarre Paradiso (Fig. 14), also painted for the Ognissanti. The fourth painting, an Ecce Homo--probably the one that was commissioned by the Cardinal de Lorraine between 1558 and 1561, cannot now be traced. (46) The additional features that link this last painting to the Centurion are the facial type of Christ, the placement of the figures close to the picture plane and the ubiquitous pointing finger.

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The paintings commissioned for Treviso are distinguished by a gradual dissolution of style which is manifest in the Paradise and Resurrection by the diminution of the human form against the background and in the exaggeratedly mannerist contortions of the figures. As such, they bear no stylistic resemblance to Christ and the Centurion of Capernaum, which merely shares an iconographic detail.

However, the San Lorenzo altarpiece (Fig. 16), now in the Duomo in Treviso, may be the bridge between the earlier Centurion picture with its sound pictorial style and pleasing medley of quotations from Titian, Raphael and the Fontainebleau School, and the progressive disintegration of Bordon's twilight years. The altarpiece, St Lawrence with Sts Jerome, Peter, John the Baptist and Sebastian, (San Lorenzo Altarpiece), signed and dated 1562, represents the commencement of a gentle slide into the agitated poses of Bordon's later years, at the same time recalling the Biancade altarpiece and the Mount Stuart picture, with its similar facial types, the solid muscularity of the centurion and the soft folds in the drapery. (47)

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Who was the painting's patron?

Bordon's patronage and chronology have always presented a challenge to the art historian. The similarity of certain iconographical details of Christ and the Centurion of Capernaum and the Battle of the Gladiators point to a possible patron in Augsburg, possibly a military one or even conceivably one associated with ill health.

The parallels with the Biancade altarpiece and with the later San Lorenzo altarpiece highlight its position somewhere inbetween, probably between the end of the 1550s and about 1560, when Bordon was on his travels in France (where his patrons included the powerful Guise brothers--the Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise), or on his way back from France via Augsburg or Milan.