Bartolomeo Passarotti was born in Bologna in 1529 and not much is known about his early years. According to his first biographer, Raffaele Borghini (1537–1588), Passarotti studied with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573) and with Taddeo Zuccaro (1529–1566) in Rome, where his presence was first recorded in 1551.¹ About a decade later, Passarotti opened a workshop in the city of his birth. Passarotti went on to become one of the leading artists in Bologna in the 1570s and 1580s and his services were requested not only by members of the Bolognese upper classes, but also by members of the Church in Rome.

Early in his career, Passarotti was clearly influenced by other north Italian artists, such as Antonio da Correggio (1489–1534) and Parmigianino (1503–1540), as well as Flemish painters in Italy, such as Maerten de Vos (1532–1603) and Denijs Calvaert (1540–1619). Passarotti was also skilled as a draughtsman and engraver and had a large collection of anticaglie (miscellaneous antiquities), which he put on public display, attracting Bologna’s intellectual elite. Between 1575 and the early 1580s, Passarotti was the leading painter in the city. The butcher shop and fishmonger scenes for which Passarotti became known betray the influence of Flemish painters Pieter Aertsen (1508–1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (1533–1574).² Together with Vicenzo Campi (1536–1591), Passarotti paved the way for the development of this pictorial genre in Italy and his work served as a touchstone for the great achievements in genre painting of Annibale Carracci (1560–1609).³

The two head studies in The Klesch Collection are preparatory works for specific expressions. They display a pictorial freedom that contrasts with Passarotti’s usual polished style, particularly visible in the loose rendering of the beards, hair and clothing—the latter sketched with a few deft strokes. Study for the Head of a Man Looking Down has been connected to Passarotti’s great painting of The Fishmonger (private collection), in which the same figure appears as a fish seller, his expression exuding annoyance at the blaring cries of another market trader. The Fishmonger is part of a series of four paintings datable to the years around 1580, once in the Mattei collection in Rome, which included The Butcher’s Shop, another Fishmonger (both now in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini, Rome) and The Poulterer’s Shop (Fondazione Longhi, Florence).⁴ Towards the end of his career, Passarotti focused on religious paintings and altarpieces, with his latest recorded work dating to 1588. On his death in 1593, he left a thriving workshop to his four sons and two grandsons.⁵

¹ A. Ghirardi, ‘Passarotti [Passerotti], Bartolomeo’, Grove Art Online, 31 March 2000, https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T065675
² G. Cavalli-Björkman, ‘A Bolognese portrait of a butcher’, The Burlington Magazine, 141, no. 1156, July 1999, p. 418.
³ S. McTighe, ‘Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci’, The Art Bulletin, 86, no. 2, June 2004, p. 301.
⁴ D. Benati, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Bologna 1529–1592: Studi di teste, Bologna 2013, pp. 7–13.
⁵ Ghirardi in Grove Art Online 2000.