In 1619 Gianfrancesco Sagredo and Galileo Galilei exchanged protraits as a sign of their longstanding friendship. The portrait of Sagredo, based on a asketch by the famous Venetian painter Leandro Bassano, but excecuted by Leandro's brother Gerolamo, disappeared in the 18th century. Via a little-known portrait in the Zhytomyr regional Museum, Ukraine, which has Sagredo's name on the back, I identify the lost Sagredo portrait as the so-called Portrait of a Procurator of St. Mark, attributed to Leandro Bassano, in the Ashmoelan Museum, Oxford. Using Sagredo's letters to Galileo, I reconstruct the process by which the portrait was produced and analyze the likely meaning of its iconography. I argue that Sagredo's sel-fashioning in the portraits and letters directly influenced the uses to which Galileo put him as an interlocutor in the Dialogue, where his experience as Venetian Consul in Syria stood in for experiments. Furthermore, i argue that the rediscovery of the painting allows us to understand more fully the important role friendship played in making early modern natural philosophy and analyze the processes by which historical identity is formed and dissolved.
...MoreDescription An analysis of a portrait of Sagredo and the clues it presents to helping understand his role as a character in Galileo's Dialogue.
Similar Citations
Article
Tognoni, Federico;
(2007)
“È fatto più giorni sono, similissimo, da mano eccellente”: il ritratto-icona di Galileo
(/isis/citation/CBB000931278/)
Article
Rossi, Massimiliano;
(2007)
La Crusca nell'occhio: l'Empoli tra Galileo e Michelangelo il Giovane
(/isis/citation/CBB000931281/)
Chapter
Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi;
Paolo Tongiorgi;
(2006)
Natura, verbum, signum: brevi note su imprese e storia naturale
(/isis/citation/CBB955884338/)
Chapter
Stefano Spataro;
(2019)
"Ingannante, perché ingannato". Legittimità e limiti della raffigurazione parassitologica nelle ricerche vallisneriane
(/isis/citation/CBB511958427/)
Article
Ivan Malara;
(2019)
Galileo and His Sources? A Different Methodological Approach to Galileo’s Juveni-lia
(/isis/citation/CBB648734158/)
Article
Finocchiaro, Maurice A.;
(2011)
Galilean Argumentation and the Inauthenticity of the Cigoli Letter on Painting vs. Sculpture
(/isis/citation/CBB001230563/)
Book
Keynes, Milo;
(2005)
The Iconography of Sir Isaac Newton to 1800
(/isis/citation/CBB000651729/)
Book
Wilding, Nick;
(2014)
Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB001422027/)
Article
Stéphane Garcia;
(2003)
L'image de Galilée ou la trajectoire symbolique du portrait de 1635
(/isis/citation/CBB153088007/)
Article
Flora Vafea;
(2017)
The Astronomical Instruments in Saint Catherine's Iconography at the Holy Monastery of Sinai
(/isis/citation/CBB604794925/)
Article
Bullen Presciutti, Diana;
(2015)
Domesticating Cannibalism: Visual Rhetorics of Madness and Maternal Infanticide in Fifteenth-Century Italy
(/isis/citation/CBB001422561/)
Thesis
Niekrasz, Carmen Cramer;
(2007)
Woven Theaters of Nature: Flemish Tapestry and Natural History, 1550--1600
(/isis/citation/CBB001560640/)
Book
Elizabeth Horodowich;
Lia Markey;
(2017)
The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750
(/isis/citation/CBB216328332/)
Article
Federico Tognoni;
(2004)
Galileo nel terzo centenario della nascita: eroe italico e santo laico
(/isis/citation/CBB935010013/)
Article
Fara, Patricia;
(2008)
Looking for Aristotle
(/isis/citation/CBB000932152/)
Chapter
Metze, Gudula;
Kühne, Andreas;
Kirschner, Stefan;
(2005)
Der Wandel der Copernicus-Porträts bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts
(/isis/citation/CBB000773686/)
Article
Leonhard, Karin;
(2015)
Painted Gems. The Color Worlds of Portrait Miniature Painting in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001553533/)
Book
Alessandro Ottaviani;
(2021)
Natura ed esattezza all'alba della scienza galileiana. Le 'Observationes' di Fabio Colonna
(/isis/citation/CBB900806242/)
Article
Paolo Molaro;
(2016)
On the lost portrait of Galileo by the Tuscan painter Santi di Tito
(/isis/citation/CBB844459404/)
Article
Elisabeth Oy-Marra;
(2017)
“Nel conoscere le cose tutte della natura”: Nicolò Simonelli and the Musaeum of Flavio Chigi
(/isis/citation/CBB997974052/)
Be the first to comment!