Giovan Battista Moroni: un ‘Ritratto di gentiluomo con libro’ nella Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena e un ‘Ritratto di donna anziana’ da ritrovare

The article presents two new works intended to augment the list of works by Giovan Battista Moroni, the 16th-century master of so-called “reality painting”: the ‘Portrait of a man with a book’ of the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena and the ‘Portrait of an old woman’, whose present whereabouts is unknown though is familiar to us through a photograph. From the late 1970s the painting of the Sienese picture gallery – which together with two previously known early canvases forms the Moronian nucleus of the Spannocchi collection – was thought to be by an anonymous artist from Bergamo close to Moroni and Cavagna. Although now exhibited in the Tuscan museum with the correct attribution, the painting has been ignored by numerous recent studies o n the painter from Albino. On the basis of historical and collectionistic considerations, and as a result of comparisons with other known works by the painter, the portrait can be placed within the artistic career of Moroni with a proposed dating to the early 1560s. The second part of the paper investigates the presence of the ‘Portrait of an old woman’ in the Bergamo collection of Antonio Piccinelli (1816-1891), where at the beginning of the 20th century the work was exhibited en pendant with Moroni’s ‘Portrait of an old man’ now in Pasadena.