Jacopino del Conte

The woman in this portrait, wrapped in a sable fur and painted on a slab of slate, is Giulia Gonzaga, widow of Vespasiano Colonna, count of Fondi south of Rome. At Fondi and later in Naples she gathered writers and churchmen who argued for reform inside the Church, and her circle drew the attention of the Inquisition. Her pose follows an earlier portrait of her by the Venetian Sebastiano del Piombo, whose name the Borghese inventory of 1693 attached to this picture.

The painter most scholars now name is Jacopino del Conte, a Florentine who trained with Andrea del Sarto and made his career in Rome. The art historian Federico Zeri proposed him in 1948, and in 2018 Michela Corso suggested Leonardo Grazia of Pistoia instead, a painter following Jacopino's experiments on stone.

Jacopino himself is best documented in the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollato, home of the Roman confraternity that comforted condemned prisoners, where he painted frescoes between 1536 and 1541 and later an altarpiece of the Deposition. He also painted Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, just after his death in 1556, a portrait valued as a close likeness of the saint. Jacopino died in Rome in 1598, at about 88.