Andrea Solario and Studio

Private collection, South of France, circa 1950;
Mme. Aboulker, 22 Place Malsherbes, Paris (according to a label on the reverse);
Acquired by the present owner in 1995 at Gros & Delettrez, Paris.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external expert and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a fairly thick panel, unbevelled and perhaps poplar in one piece with two original cross bars still in place. The back has old black priming and has remained unusually stable essentially, and the painting in general looks as though it has lead a remarkably undisturbed past life for several centuries. There are three fairly brief cracks running up about two to three inches from the base visible in the paint, with two rather shorter running down from the top edge. These have comparatively recent retouching and show slight recent movement in narrow white lines starting to come through, presumably resulting from changes in temperature and humidity in changing hands, travel etc. At the base there seems to have been a possible recent change in framing with a band about two inches wide seeming to have been perhaps covered within a rebate previously. However clearly the panel and the paint have been unusually secure and stable over time, with a beautiful minute even craquelure throughout. The head is in exceptionally good condition, including the delicate Leonardesque sfumato modelling, which seems virtually untouched. Only the beard is worn. There seems to have been some cleaning a little while ago in the chest and arm, which was then roughly dirtied over with uneven streaks and other more recent little retouchings visible under ultra violet light, which then included also retouching over the cracks from the base and upper edge. The rope has slightly older retouching beside it on the left, half suggesting a pentimento, with later strengthening touches to the detail over possible wear from the cleaning test. Another cleaning test seems to have been made by the lower right edge. Extraordinarily, however even the background elsewhere appears to have had little or no previous intervention. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
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Unknown to Prof. David Alan Brown when compiling his 1987 catalogue on Solario, this moving depiction of Christ crowned with thorns is likely to have been painted by the artist during his stay in France between 1507-09 when he was in the employ of Cardinal Georges I d'Amboise at his château in Gaillon. Two signed versions of the composition exist, both of which Brown dates to the end of Solario's French sojourn; one in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia, which Brown considers primary, and the other in the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig.¹

Quite apart from its stylistic affinities with Solario's output from his French sojourn (discussed below) this Ecce Homo, like the two signed versions, as well as a number of the known copies, has its earliest known roots in a collection in France (the Philadelphia panel is charged on the reverse with the arms of the Rouillé d'Orfeuil family of Normandy and the Leipzig version was in the collection of the Duc de Liancourt as early as 1666). Furthermore, and like the Philadelphia version² and other works dated to the artist's time in France, it is painted on an oak panel, an unusual support for an Italian work but one widely used in France at the time.

As Brown states of the Philadelphia version, its 'definizione enfatica', its 'tempo ritmica delle forme' and 'tonalità predominantemente rossa e verde' recalls the artist's Madonna del cuscino verde in the Louvre,³ one of the artist's undoubted masterpieces that is, too, usually dated to his French period. Like the Madonna del cuscino verde, this Ecce Homo is characteristic of the softer, more graceful and naturalistic style that gradually replaced the exacting precision of Solario's youthful works. It combines the emotive power of the northern masters and Antonello da Messina, whose finely detailed devotional images he would have seen in Milan, Venice and indeed in France, with lessons from Leonardo da Vinci who is perhaps most responsible for the introduction of a new dramatic language of expression and gesture in north Italian painting at the turn of the century. Solario's own role in this regard should however not be understated for it was through works of such emotional pull as this Ecce Homo, which was very widely copied,  that Italian devotional art developed so rapidly in the first few decades of the 16th century and influenced painters and painting throughout western Europe then and for years to come.

1.  D.A. Brown, Andrea Solario, Milan 1987, pp. 212-214, nos. 50 & 51, reproduced figs. 146 & 147 respectively.
2.  The Leipzig version was transferred from panel to canvas in the late 18^th century.
3.  Brown, op. cit., pp. 214-16, no. 52, reproduced figs. 149-151.