Portrait of a Man, Possibly Girolamo Rosati (1533–34): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Man, Possibly Girolamo Rosati (1533–34) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lorenzo Lotto (Italian, 1480–1556).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The gesture of the elegantly dressed man is a mystery. Is he rising from his chair to address someone or is he pointing to something outside the frame? His right hand rests on a piece of paper (a letter?), while on the table are clover—a symbol of abundance, good fortune, and happy marriage—and jasmine, associated with purity and love, further emphasized by the roses on the trellis. There may have been a companion portrait of the sitter’s bride, to whom he acknowledges his devotion. Another recent interpretation identifies the sitter as Girolamo Rosati, a high official in Fermo, on Italy’s east coast. The paper may be a design for one of his important architectural projects, to which he may be pointing in the distance. The interrupted moment is a naturalistic touch characteristic of Lotto, quite distinct from the formality of the other Italian Renaissance portraits in the museum's collection. Though this portrait clearly articulates the man’s status, Lotto emphasizes his individuality and interiority as much as a socially constructed identity.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Man, Possibly Girolamo Rosati
• Date: 1533–34
• Creator attribution: Lorenzo Lotto (Italian, 1480–1556)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 135.9 x 128 x 8.6 cm (53 1/2 x 50 3/8 x 3 3/8 in.); Unframed: 108.2 x 100.5 cm (42 5/8 x 39 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1950.250

A detail from the museum

This fashionable man broadcasts his wealth by wearing a fur-lined velvet and satin outfit with expensive gold jewelry.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Thieme, Ulrich, Felix Becker, Fred. C. Willis, and Hans Vollmer. Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelmann, 1907.
• Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works, with an Index of Places. Oxford, United Kingdom : The Clarendon Press, 1932.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.