Portrait of a Noblewoman and son

Bartolomeo Passarotti kept one of the leading painting studios in Bologna in the second half of the 1500s, and he was one of the portraitists the city's families turned to when they wanted to be recorded with dignity. This double portrait of a noblewoman and her son is that kind of commission, a mother and child set in dark, costly clothes against a plain ground so that faces and hands carry everything. Passarotti had studied in Rome and drew obsessively, and his sober, sharply observed likenesses helped set the tone in Bologna just before the young Carracci cousins opened their reforming academy in the same city. He was also known for lively, earthy pictures of butcher stalls and market sellers, so the hush of a formal portrait like this shows the other, more buttoned-up work that paid the bills.