ATTRIBUÉ À GEORGES BOBA c. 1540-après 1593 Lot n° 21

Portrait of Cardinal Charles de Lorraine (1524 - 1574) ; Portrait of François de Lorraine, Duc d'Aumale puis de Guise (1519 - 1563) Oil on canvas (pair). Height: 193 cm - Width: 106.5 cm Height: 201.5 cm - Width: 111 cm Georges Boba is a little-known artist of Flemish origin, but his work has been documented by Alexandra Zvereva. According to Carel van Mander (1548 - 1606), author of Het Schilder-Boeck1, he was initially a pupil of Frans Floris (1517 - 1570) in Antwerp, before moving to Veneto, where he joined the studios of Titian (c. 1488 - 1576) and Tintoretto (1518 - 1594). Although the corpus of his work is not very extensive at present, sources indicate that he was not only a portraitist, since a drawing formerly in the Mariette2 collection, now in the British Museum, is attributed to him and bears his Italian signature: Giorgio Bombini (San Bartolomeo all'Isola, Tiberina Island, London, British Museum, inv. 1946,0713.115). In 1560, he painted a portrait of the French politician Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553 - 1617). Some time later, in 1569, he entered the service of Cardinal de Lorraine, following him to France and Reims. When his patron died in 1574, he worked and lived with his sister, Renée de Lorraine (1522 - 1602), abbess of the Saint-Pierre-les-Dames convent in Reims. The familiar faces of the two brothers are based on prestigious models, one by El Greco (1541 - 1614; Fig. 1), the other by François Clouet (c. 1520-1572; Fig. 2). Reference works for the dissemination of their image, they were also the basis for Boba's own portraits during his time in the Cardinal's service. The artist repeatedly drew inspiration from Greco's portrait, engraving it around 1575 (Fig. 3), taking certain liberties, such as replacing a parrot in the background with a crucifix3. In the portrait we present, he retains the face from the original composition, in which the Venetian treatment, no doubt inherited from his Italian years, shines through. This time, he prefers to present the cardinal in full-length, three-quarter view, and uses the same posture for his brother, each leaning on an element alluding to their respective careers (an evangeliary book and a helmet), the two men echoing each other at the same time. Sources also point to Boba as the author of another portrait of the Cardinal de Lorraine and his brother, the Duc de Guise, whose whereabouts remain unknown to this day. They could therefore be the ones we are presenting today, true rediscoveries and consequent additions to the artist's corpus. While the inscriptions in the upper register seem to be of a later date, the one in the portrait of the Duc de Guise, inscribed on the architectural element and accompanied by his monogram (entwining the Greek letters alpha and phi), could be seen as a mysterious reference from the cardinal to his brother, or, if the portrait was executed after the death of its model (1563), a discreet eulogy from the commissioner to the duke. We would also like to thank Bruno Restif for his suggestion that we link the two portraits we are presenting with the Galerie des Hommes Illustres, commissioned by Cardinal de Richelieu (1585 - 1642) for the Palais cardinal. He draws a correlation between the portraits of the Cardinal de Lorraine and his brother, the Duc de Guise, both included in the gallery's iconographic program, and whose portraits are now known only through the engraved copies published in Marc Vulson de La Colombière's 1650 work. 1. Het Schilder-Boeck, literally "The Book of Painters", was written by Carel van Mander, himself a painter, and first published in Haarlem in 1604. In six volumes, the author took stock of notable painters from Antiquity to the early 17th century, and laid the theoretical foundations of painting. The work is modelled on, and perhaps compared with, Vasari's well-known The Lives of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550; 2nd edition 1568). 2. Philippe de Chennevières, Anatole de Montaiglon, Abecedario de P.-J. Mariette: et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes, t. I, Paris, J.-B. Dumoulin, 1853 - 1862, pp. 152 - 153. 3. On this subject, see Bruno Restif, lecturer in modern history, who has worked on the iconography of Cardinal de Lorraine in an article available online: Bruno Restif, "Les portraits du cardinal de Lorraine. Indices esthétiques et corporels d'un séducteur en politique et religion", in Jean Balsamo, Thomas Nicklas, Bruno Restif (dir.),