Portrait of a Collector

In Parma in the 1520s, educated men were catching the fashion for antiquity, collecting ancient coins, small bronzes and fragments of old carving, and having themselves painted among their treasures. Parmigianino, then in his early twenties, made this portrait of one such man around 1524. On the table sit four Roman coins and a little bronze figure of a woman. Behind him leans a broken relief of Venus with Mars and Cupid, carved to look antique. The man holds a breviary, a book of daily prayers, so the picture balances his taste for pagan Rome against his Christian faith. For a long time no one knew who he was, and he was even taken for a priest, until scholars proposed the Parma collector Francesco Baiardi, a man the painter knew.