Rosso\u2019s baptismal record giving the date of his birth as Saturday, March 8, 1494 (modern style), at 18 hours.<\/p>\n
Florence, Archivio dell\u2019Opera del Duomo, Libro dei battezzati maschi, 1492-1501<\/i>, fol. 34 recto<\/i>, March 9, 1493:<\/p>\n
\u201cDomenicha ad\u00ec 9 di detto [=March 1493\/4] Giovanbaptista et Romolo di Iacopo di Ghuasparre, popolo di Santo Michele Bisdomini, nacque ad\u00ec 8, hore 18.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Berti, 1983, 58, brought up the possibility that Fra Jacopo at SS. Annunziata, who was an early patron of Rosso (see P.2<\/a> and P.3<\/a>) and whose family name seems to have been Rossi or de\u2019Rossi, may have been a relative of the painter.\u00a0 B\u00e9guin thought (in September 1994) that because of his surname the frate was Rosso\u2019s father and that Vasari deliberately left out this information of Rosso\u2019s illegitimate birth.\u00a0 Costamagna, 1994, 20, 94, n. 24, 102, under Cat. 2, with reference to B\u00e9guin\u2019s oral opinion, and 120, under Cat. 16, that the frate\u2019s name lends support to the artist being his natural son, as he used the name Rosso, adopted also because of his red hair.\u00a0 Nova, 1995, 553, also thought Rosso may have taken his name from \u201cFra Jacopo di Battista de Rubeis,\u201d as well as from his red hair.<\/p>\n This fanciful conjecture is belied by the fact that Rosso\u2019s name in the baptismal record gives, as part of his name, his father\u2019s: Jacopo di Guasparre.\u00a0 In a document of 18 April 1517 related to a commission at the Annunziata (see P.3<\/a> for the document also mentioned in L.10<\/a>) both the artist and his patron are named, the first as \u201cGiovan Batista di Iacopo,\u201d the friar as \u201cIacopo di Batista,\u201d not as Jacopo di Guasparre.\u00a0 A document of 30 June 1518 (DOC.2a<\/a>) gives the artist\u2019s name as: \u201cIohanni Baptiste olim Iacopi Gasparis, vocato il Rosso, pictori.\u201d\u00a0 An Aretine document of 29 November 1528 (see document in the Preface to D.31-34<\/a>) gives the artist\u2019s name as: \u201cMaestro Rosso di Iacopo di Guaspari.\u201d\u00a0 Many other documents refer to him as \u201cRubeus Iacopi Gasparis\u201d or in a similar fashion using the name that appears in his baptismal record.\u00a0 Thus there is no reason to conclude that the Fra Jacopo of the Servites was a relative, much less the father of Rosso, even if the friar\u2019s family name was Rossi, a very common surname.\u00a0 Vasari says the artist was called Rosso because of his \u201cpelo rosso\u201d (Vasari-Milanesi, V, 167).<\/p>\n For the fullest record of the name of Rosso’s father, see the documents published in Waldman, 2000, 607, 612, Doc. 1 (DOC.1a<\/a>) and Doc. 3 (DOC.1d<\/a>).<\/p>\n Costamagna, 1994, 24, 42, 119-120, Cat. 16, with Color Fig., thought Pontormo\u2019s Portrait of a Young Man<\/i> in the Uffizi (Inv. 1890, no. 743) might be a portrait of Rosso.\u00a0 His argument is related to the book of musical scores that the figure holds, an allusion to Rosso\u2019s interest in music rather than to the sitter\u2019s profession, and to the red of the book\u2019s covers and of the back of the chair; Costamagna also thought the red hair of the sitter may be dyed to conform to his name, which he would have taken from his frate father.\u00a0 I cannot accept any of this.\u00a0 On the subject of Rosso\u2019s appearance, and on the supposition that he was, like Pontormo, bearded already as a young man, see Carroll, 1987, 50-53, no. 1.<\/p>\n <\/a>1<\/sup> The date of Rosso\u2019s birth was given correctly by Milanesi in Vasari-Milanesi, V, 1881, 155, n. 1.\u00a0 Milanesi did not mention that the year he gave was in modern reckoning and hence later authors have sometimes supposed that the date he gave was in Florentine style and consequently put Rosso\u2019s year of birth a year later by modern reckoning (Colnaghi, 1928, 236; Venturi, IX, 5, 1932, 193; Carroll, 1964 [1976], I, Bk. II, 1, 67, n. 1; Vasari-Darragon, 1984, 177, 192, n. 1; Vasari-Turin, 1986, 749, n. 1; A. Giovanetti, in Pittura. Cinquecento<\/i>, 1988, II, 825).\u00a0 The document was published by Franklin, 1987, 652, n. 1, mistakenly giving the date of the document as March 8 and omitting the reference to that date in the document itself.\u00a0 Franklin mentioned Gino Corti\u2019s explanation that the name Romolo was given as a second name by the parish priest for its talismanic properties and was then dropped.\u00a0 Corti wrote me that Romolo was frequently used as a second name in the second half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century but he did not know why, but it was not his suggestion that it was for its talismanic properties.\u00a0 For the correct date, see also Carroll, 1987, 13, 14, 33, n. 7; Franklin, 1994, 296, 1, 271, n. 1, 296, Appendix H, DOCUMENT 1, 316, mentioning again the talismanic properties of the name Romolo; and Ciardi, 1994, 1, 271, n. 1, where the document is transcribed.<\/p>\n According to the translator, Alice de Rosen Jervis, in Landucci, 1927, 9, n. 1, the Florentine day began at 8 p.m. (sunset) so that the \u201chore 18\u201d mentioned in the document gives 2 p.m. in modern reckoning as the hour of Rosso\u2019s birth.\u00a0 Gius. Odoardo Corrazzini, the editor of Agostino Lapini, Diario Fiorentino<\/i>, Florence, 1900, XIII, n. 1, gives 6 a.m. as the modern equivalent of the baptismal record\u2019s \u201ca hore 12\u201d for the hour of Lapini\u2019s birth on 26 October 1515.\u00a0 According to this reckoning, Rosso would have been born at noon.\u00a0 Knowledge of the exact hour of Rosso\u2019s birth might at some time be valuable for astrological calculations in relation to Rosso\u2019s art, but I have not yet found this need, although I had once suspected it in regard to the Fury<\/i> (E.18<\/a>).\u00a0 It may be of some interest in relation to Rosso\u2019s baptismal record giving his name as Giovanbaptista et Romolo that Lapini\u2019s name in his baptismal record is Agostino, Fabiano et Romolo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rosso\u2019s baptismal record giving the date of his birth as Saturday, March 8, 1494 (modern style), at 18 hours. Florence, Archivio dell\u2019Opera del Duomo, Libro dei battezzati maschi, 1492-1501, fol. 34 recto, March 9, 1493: \u201cDomenicha ad\u00ec 9 di detto [=March 1493\/4] Giovanbaptista et Romolo di Iacopo di Ghuasparre, popolo di Santo Michele Bisdomini, nacque […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"parent":822,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8624","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8624"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12030,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8624\/revisions\/12030"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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