Seite - 6 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Introduction6 him was sized up’. This idea that a good portrait painter is able to fathom the deeper psychology, perhaps even the subconscious of his sitter, I find a highly fascinating, but also a very questionable assumption. I have tried to test this assumption many years ago, when I gave a talk on the Strada portrait to a class of second-year students of art-history at Leiden University. Before I had told them anything at all about the sitter, I asked the students to write down what they thought his character would have been like, just by looking at his portrait. I had given them a hand-out with the following three questions: – What do you think about the social status of the person depicted in this portrait, and do you have any idea what might be his profession? – Do you think that it is possible on the basis of this portrait to determine specific traits of character of the sitter, both positive and negative, and if so, which ones? (e.g. was he generous or grasping, smart or stupid, truthful or devious, corrupt or honest, and so on). – Do you think the portrait provides any indication about the personal rela- tionship between the sitter and the artist? In the interval of the lecture I totted up the response of the fourteen students, and we discussed its outcome, which was quite interesting. It certainly cor- responded but little with Pope-Hennessy’s reading of the portrait. As could be expected, all respondents thought the painting portrayed someone of high social status, which is an obvious purpose of this, as it is of the majority of formal portraits. More interesting was the response to the second question: only two respondents did not think it possible to conclude anything about the character of the sitter from a painting such as this. In the light of Pope- Hennessy’s negative judgment, it is more surprising that only one respondent expressed a similar negative view. The other twelve respondents all felt that the painting intended to convey a positive image of the sitter, defining his char- acter in terms such as ‘open-minded’, ‘a dry sense of humour’, ‘smart’, ‘strict but just’, ‘ambitious, dynamic, noble’, ‘energetic’, ‘cheerful’, ‘resolute, knows what he wants’, ‘observant’, ‘loves beautiful things’, ‘self-assured, vain, but not exces- sively conceited’, ‘well-educated’, ‘reads a lot, erudite’. The response to the last question was rather evenly divided: about one half of the students thought that there was no particularly close relationship be- tween painter and sitter, i.e. they considered Titian’s attitude to be a purely professional one; some of them even found the portrait rather impersonal; while the others did presuppose some sort of personal relationship between painter and model, as close acquaintances or colleagues or as friends, one of them even presupposing that the painter admired his model. Only one respon- dent thought Titian might not really have liked his ‘pretentious, showy’ sitter. Obviously this test was not intended as serious research into the recep- tion of sixteenth-century portraiture, but I do think it shows how easily one