An Audience With Getty’s Pope Portrait

Beloved, beleaguered, spiritually exalted, world-wise. Sebastiano del Piombo’s “Portrait of Pope Clement VII” says it all about the Pope who survived the Sack of Rome in 1527 and became one of the greatest art patrons of the Renaissance.

Los Angeles’ art audience may not be familiar with the artist or his subject, but that will change. The commanding portrait--executed around 1531, in oil on a 41 1/2x34 1/2-inch sheet of slate--is the latest acquisition of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s painting department. The Getty paid $11 million for the painting, which goes on view today in the museum’s Renaissance gallery.

“This painting would be a welcome addition to any collection,” museum director John Walsh said. “It is very hard to buy High Renaissance paintings of any kind, let alone a great masterpiece of papal portraiture by an artist who was the greatest portrait painter in Rome.”

“This is a terribly important picture for our collection,” curator George Goldner said, noting that the Sebastiano is one of only three significant High Renaissance paintings in Los Angeles. The others are Raphael’s “Madonna and Child With Book” at the Norton Simon Museum and Fra Bartolommeo’s “Holy Family” at the County Museum of Art.

“The Sebastiano is interesting in terms of the subject, whom the artist knew very well, and in terms of the experimental technique,” Goldner said. Sebastiano, who was the first artist to use slate for major portraits, apparently chose stone because of the material’s permanence and the tonalities that result from painting on the dark surface, he said.

According to a letter from Sebastiano to Michelangelo, the Pope commissioned the Getty portrait as a more permanent form of a painting that he had done on canvas, associate curator Dawson Carr said. Adopting the format of Raphael’s “Portrait of Julius II,” Sebastiano painted a three-quarter-length portrait with the figure seated diagonally to the picture plane. Although Raphael invented the pose, Sebastiano turned it into the standard way to depict pontiffs, Carr said.

Little is known of “Portrait of Clement VII” after its completion, but an English collector apparently took it out of Italy in the 17th Century. The painting’s whereabouts had been unknown for many years, until 1987 when it surfaced at a Sotheby’s sale room in Chester. Filthy and nearly unrecognizable, it was misidentified as a 19th-Century Italian work, but British dealer Philip Parker snapped it up for $300. He promptly took it to Sebastiano expert Michael Hirst, of the Courtauld Institute in London, who attributed the painting to the 16th-Century master. Six months later, on Dec. 11, 1987, Parker sold the portrait for $752,000 at Christie’s London.

As it turns out, Parker made a steal. So did the buyer, London dealer Julian Agnew, when he sold the painting to the Getty. But Agnew also gambled that the painting would be in salable condition when it emerged from centuries of grime. He was the only bidder on the Sebastiano at the Christie’s auction (which took place before Goldner began buying paintings for the Getty), but the risk paid off.

“It’s in wonderful condition,” Getty conservator Elisabeth Mention said. The only notable losses are tiny flecks of pigment in the pontiff’s red garment. The curtain behind him, which might have been expected to turn a muddy brown, remains its original green.

The painting’s obscurity may have protected it from the rough cleaning and restoration that many more famous works have endured. “Some restoration was done in the 17th Century, but it is essentially untouched. That’s quite amazing for a painting of this importance and age,” Mention said.

The Getty agreed to buy the Sebastiano last fall, but the painting was subject to British heritage protection laws, which delay the export of major works of art to allow time for a British collector or institution to match the selling price and keep the work in Britain. There was no challenge to the Sebastiano sale, probably because London’s National Gallery has several major works by the artist, including his masterpiece, “Raising of Lazarus” (1517-19).

Now installed in Malibu, the painting provides a telling contrast to another, slightly later Italian portrait in the Getty’s collection, Pontormo’s “Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici” (circa 1537), Walsh said. The elegant young prince stands and faces his audience, while the powerful spiritual leader--portrayed as a secular monarch--sits and gazes off to the side. Both exert a strong physical presence and make themselves known “through body language,” Walsh said. But the Sebastiano “sums up the achievements of an earlier generation . . . in simple volumes, clarity and elemental strength,” while the Pontormo “is all about complexity and inwardness,” he said.

Born Sebastiano di Luciano, circa 1485, the painter became known as Sebastiano Veneziano, for his work in Venice. He was summoned to Rome in 1511 by Sienese merchant Agostino Chigi, a patron of Raphael, to paint frescoes in the Villa Farnesina. Except for a two-year visit to Venice, Sebastiano remained in Rome until his death in 1547.

Had he not been overshadowed by some of the most illustrious figures in all of art history, Sebastiano would probably be much better known. In his day, he was a close friend and associate of Michelangelo and the favorite painter of Clement VII, who commissioned Raphael’s “Transfiguration” altarpiece at the Vatican Museum and three major works by Michelangelo: the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library in Florence and the “Last Judgment” fresco for the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Sebastiano was with the Pope during his imprisonment after the Sack of Rome. In 1531, the same year Clement VII commissioned his portrait, the Pope appointed Sebastiano Keeper of the Papal Seals. The position gave the artist a sinecure, while the seals, which were made of lead ( piombo ), gave him a new name, Sebastiano del Piombo.

The Getty’s new acquisition is the only painting by Sebastiano on the West Coast, Carr said, but there are examples of his work is other American museums. On the East Coast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has Sebastiano’s painting of a man said to be Christopher Columbus, and the National Gallery in Washington owns “Portrait of a Humanist” as part of the Kress Collection. In Texas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston claims a major Sebastiano portrait, and the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth owns a small tondo (round) painting of a woman.