This is a copy of a portrait by Girolamo Savoldo of c.1529 (Louvre, Paris). A bearded man wearing a metal breastplate over a gown with wide sleeves of red velvet looks out at the viewer, his back and left arm reflected in two large mirrors set at right angles behind him. This version, probably produced by a copyist in Savoldo’s workshop, has been cut down on the right hand side and the paint layers are very thin, making both reflections rather incomprehensible: the three-dimensional effect is more pronounced in the original.

The unusual composition refers to the paragone concerning the relative merits of sculpture and painting, a major theme in Renaissance artistic literature. According to Vasari, the artist Giorgione (c.1477–1510) claimed that painting was superior, since it could show several views of the same figure at a single glance, whereas a viewer was required to move around a sculpture, experiencing the views sequentially rather than simultaneously. To prove his point Giorgione produced a (now lost) painting of a figure whose front was reflected in a pool of water, one side of his body in a mirror and the other in a burnished breastplate that he had removed. In another account, Paolo Pino’s Dialogue on Painting of 1548 the figure painted by Giorgione is St George and the reflection in armour is replaced by another mirror. Giorgione’s painting was greatly admired for its ingenuity. Polished armour in the lower right corner of the Louvre version of Savoldo’s portrait, reflecting the soldier’s hand, corroborates the idea that the painting is inspired by Giorgione’s lost painting.

When it was acquired by Charles II, the present painting was described as ‘One head wth a Lookeing glass of Giorgione’; in 1818 it was also listed as Giorgione’s self-portrait and hanging at Kensington Palace, although by 1863 it had been reattributed to Savoldo. The sitter in the Louvre version, which is signed by Girolamo Savoldo, has been described as the French military commander Gaston de Foix (1489–1512); however, scholars have more recently catalogued it as a self-portrait of Savoldo on the basis of facial similarity to his other accepted self-portraits. The position of the hands mimics that of an artist holding a paintbrush and palette, allowing for the mirror reversal of a right handed person, which is then reversed back by the rear mirror.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016