Bartolomeo Passarotti’s Portrait of a Man with a Dog

The sitter in this portrait is unidentified, bearded, and dressed in the sober dark cloth that Passarotti’s Bolognese patrons often wore when they sat for him. He holds a small spaniel at chest height with the ease of long habit, looking directly out at the viewer with the composed self-possession that Passarotti gave almost all his subjects. The painting follows the established formula of the Italian gentleman’s portrait precisely: half-length, dark ground, the face brought forward by careful management of light, the composition anchored by an attribute in the sitter’s hands. What makes it unusual is not its structure but the nature of that attribute, and what the attribute asks the viewer to read.

Dogs carried a clearly understood symbolic language in sixteenth-century portraiture. Andrea Alciato’s (1492–1550) Emblemata (1531), the foundational emblem book of the Renaissance, stated it simply: dogs mean fidelity. Cesare Ripa (c. 1555–1622), in his Iconologia (1593), described the dog as the most faithful animal in the world. In portraits of married couples, a small dog placed in a woman’s lap signalled marital constancy; in portraits of widows, the same animal marked continuing faithfulness to a dead husband. The distinction between types of dog mattered in this symbolic register. Hunting dogs, large and positioned at a man’s side, declared a noble life and the pleasures of a landed estate. A small companion spaniel, held closely at chest height, spoke a different and more intimate vocabulary, concerned with personal virtue and private attachment rather than social station. In the Capitoline portrait, Passarotti places his sitter firmly within this second category. The man is declaring fidelity, and the warmth of the composition — the dog held rather than displayed, the arms encircling it — gives that declaration something more personal than symbolic convention usually requires. This is a private statement made within a public form, and the painting’s authority rests on the precision with which it holds both at once.

Passarotti had been the dominant portraitist in Bologna for over two decades by the time this work was made. His formation had taken him to Rome around 1550 with the architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573), and on a second Roman visit he lodged with the painter Taddeo Zuccaro (1529–1566), absorbing the Mannerist tradition of the Zuccaro circle alongside the discipline of the High Renaissance. By 1560 he was back in Bologna permanently, his workshop established as the focal point of the city’s artistic life. His first biographer Raffaele Borghini (1537–1588), writing in Il Riposo (Florence, 1584) while the painter was still alive, described him primarily as a portraitist of popes and cardinals — his portrait of Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni (c. 1572, Schlossmuseum Gotha) placing him at the highest level of the Italian portrait market. Three of his sons, Tiburzio (1553–1612), Aurelio (1560–1609), and Ventura (1566–1618), were trained as painters within the workshop, and Agostino Carracci (1557–1602) studied there before joining his brother and cousin in the project that would reshape Bolognese painting entirely.

Bologna in these years was a city with its own intellectual weight. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), Archbishop from 1566, had published his Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane [Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images] (1582), the most systematic Catholic theory of art produced in Italy after the Council of Trent, which circulated widely among the city’s artistic and intellectual circles. Passarotti moved within the world that Paleotti presided over, and the sobriety of his portrait practice — direct, physically present, founded on the specific rather than the ideal — belongs to that Counter-Reformation culture of decorum. His friendship with Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), the great Bolognese naturalist and professor of natural history, deepened the intellectual dimension of his looking. Aldrovandi sent Passarotti a consignment of antiquities from Rome in the summer of 1572, and the two men remained close over the following decades. Angela Ghirardi’s (b. 1951) research has traced the connection between that friendship and Passarotti’s sustained engagement with anatomy as a form of pictorial and intellectual inquiry, rooted in the same admiration for Michelangelo (1475–1564) that shaped his figure painting across his career. Looking closely at physical things — bodies, surfaces, the specific texture of living matter — was for Passarotti a form of knowledge, not a technical exercise, and the spaniel in the Capitoline portrait is observed with exactly that quality of attention.

His portrait formula was consistent enough across three decades to be immediately recognisable, and the Capitoline painting becomes more revealing when set against it. The Portrait of a Man Playing a Lute (1576, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), inscribed with the date of the Bolognese jubilee year, shows the formula at its most assured: the sitter leans informally against a table, a lute in his hands, a sheet of music beside him, the composition organised around an attribute of accomplished gentility. The Portrait of a Cavalier with his Hunting Dogs (c. 1570–80, RISD Museum, Providence) places its animals below the sitter in their correct aristocratic position, flanking him as instruments of a noble life. In both cases the attribute locates the sitter within a specific social identity and does so legibly, without ambiguity. The Capitoline portrait follows the same structural logic but replaces the public attribute with a private one. A spaniel held at chest height does not identify the sitter as a musician or a nobleman. It identifies him as a man with a particular attachment, and the painting’s claim on the viewer rests on the accuracy with which that attachment is observed rather than on the legibility of a social sign.

By the mid-1580s the city around Passarotti was changing in ways he could not have missed. The Carracci — Annibale (1560–1609), Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico (1555–1619) — had founded the Accademia dei Desiderosi around 1582, declaring a programme of reform against the artificiality of late Mannerism and in favour of a return to direct observation, classical rigour, and Venetian colour. Annibale’s Crucifixion with Saints (1583, Santa Maria della Carità, Bologna), one of the first major works to embody this programme, derived its composition from Passarotti — the debt is specific and documented — but applied to it a boldness of naturalism, a deliberate coarseness of figure handling, that went beyond anything in Passarotti’s practice. This is the distinction that matters. Passarotti’s naturalism in the portraits was empirical and personal, arrived at through decades of individual formation, intellectual friendship, and anatomical study. The Carracci made naturalism into a doctrine, argued it collectively through an institution, and declared the reform of painting as a shared theoretical project. The Capitoline portrait, with its quiet, precisely observed spaniel and its private declaration of fidelity, is the product of the first kind of practice. It does not belong to any programme. It is simply, and entirely, the work of a painter who had spent forty years learning to look.

References

Ghirardi, A. (1990) Bartolomeo Passarotti: Pittore (1529–1592). Rimini: Luise

Ghirardi, A. (n.d.) ‘Passarotti, Bartolomeo’, Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press. Available at :https://www.oxfordartonline.com/benezit/display/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.001.0001/acref-9780199773787-e-00136700?rskey=GMndYy&result=6 (Accessed 12 October 2025)

Hoper, C. (1987) Bartolomeo Passerotti. 2 vols. Worms: Wernersche

Benati, D. (1999) ‘Annibale Carracci’s Beginnings in Bologna: Between Nature and History’, in De Grazia, D., Benati, D., Feigenbaum, G., Ganz, K., Grasselli, M.M., Loisel Legrand, C. and Van Tuyll van Serooskerken, C. The Drawings of Annibale Carracci. Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C

Posner, D. (1971) Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590. New York: Phaidon

McTighe, S. (2004) ‘Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci’, The Art Bulletin, 86(2), pp. 301–323. Available at:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177419 (Accessed: 12 October 2025).

Paleotti, G. (2012) Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. W. McCuaig. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (n.d.) Bartolomeo Passarotti, Portrait of a Man Playing a Lute, 1576, acc. 48.55. Available at: https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/portrait-of-a-man-playing-a-lute-33151 (Accessed: 12 October 2025).