Sotheby's, auctioning a Portrait attributed to Bronzino. The painting belonged to a Jewish collector

In January 2023 a painting recently attributed to Agnolo Bronzino, estimated at between three and five million dollars, will go to auction in New York at Sotheby’s, included among the Old Masters. According to the famous auction house, Bronzino’s works are rarely on the open market: the last one was sold at auction at Christie’s in 2015 for over nine million dollars; it was Portrait of a Young Man with a Book. And on the attribution of the painting at Sotheby’s, Elisabeth Lobkowicz, Sotheby’s vice president and specialist in old paintings, said that “discoveries of this caliber come once in a lifetime.”

Titled Portrait of a Man Facing Left with a Pen and a Sheet of Paper, the work depicts a young man dressed in black sitting at a table: his left hand points to the writing, in Latin, on a sheet of paper, while in his right hand he holds a pen.

The painting belonged to wealthy Jewish art collector Ilse Hesselberger, who as a result of racial laws was forced to sell her Munich country estate. Including her art collection, of which the painting in question was part, which she purchased in 1927. Under pressure from Nazi officials, they persuaded her to contribute along with others to the construction of a camp in Milbertshofen that would later be used to send Jews to concentration and extermination camps. The woman was assured that her life would be spared if she paid, but it was all a lie, because, in November 1941, a few weeks after paying the amount of money needed to fund the camp, she was put on the first train to German-occupied Lithuania, where she and many other Jews were murdered by the Nazis five days later.

The work had been included in the collection of the Führermuseum, a museum Hitler had planned for his hometown of Linz, but the project was never realized. After the war, American forces found the painting inside an Austrian salt mine and later handed it over to German officials. In recent decades it has been in the possession of the Federal Republic of Germany. It remained in a federal building in Bonn for a long time, but in early 2022 it was moved to a building in Berlin used by the German Parliamentary Society.

Several years ago David J. Rowland, a New York lawyer who specializes in recovering art looted by the Nazis, learned of a painting in Germany that might have belonged to the heirs of Ilse Hesselberger. In early 2022, the portrait was returned to the heirs, who in turn turned it over to Sotheby’s for auction. Now in fact the portrait will be sold to support Jewish causes and medical care.

Attributed over time to several Italian painters, the painting has now been attributed to Bronzino, who probably painted it around 1527. “We immediately suspected that we were looking at something much more significant,” said Elizabeth Lobkowicz, a specialist in ancient art at Sotheby’s. Along with another specialist, Chris Apostle, she then sent a photograph of the painting to Carlo Falciani, professor of art history at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and an expert on Florentine portraiture, who concluded that the work was by Bronzino. Falciani noted the hands were drawn in the same way they were depicted in Bronzino’s early portraits and that “the clear light and the stereometric shape of the figure in space are exactly those of Bronzino.”

Dr. Elizabeth Pilliod, head of the art history program at Rutgers University-Camden, who was shown the painting, is also of the opinion that it is one of Bronzino’s earliest. According to a Sotheby’s statement, the painting will be catalogued with an attribution to Agnolo Bronzino by Florentine curator Carlo Falciani in an article to be published next year. In the unpublished text, Falciani investigates the possibility that the present work was originally made as a self-portrait of the Italian artist.

Image: Portrait of a Young Man with Pen and Sheet of Paper, attributed to Bronzino. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Sotheby's, auctioning a Portrait attributed to Bronzino. The painting belonged to a Jewish collector

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