 | | Author | Ignoto | | Dimensions | 40x52 | | Technique | olio su tela |
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This room contains examples of modern portraits which stem from the Flemish 15th Century school. They originated the bourgeois portrait, designed to celebrate the wealth and power of the courts and the aristocratic houses. The portraits were full of new feeling and extremely accurate naturalism. This can be seen in the small Portrait of a Friar, attributable to a 16th Century artist, with the marked naturalism in the face. It is a three quarter face portrait, the background is neutral, and he does not look at the artist but has his eyes lowered with an expression of veiled melancholy.
This representation of varieties of physical types, ages, expressions, social status and feelings can be seen in the four paintings from the Caravaggio school. There is the portrait of Guglielmo Caccia, called il Moncalvo, in which the face and expression of the subject communicates dramatic force and moral energy, the Portrait of a Monk, attributed to Luca Giordano (1632-1705), with its strong contrasts of light and shadow and its intense realism, the Portrait of an Astromoner, which while it belongs to the realist school also has a certain luminosity typical of paintings from Padania and is attributed to the Emilian artist Giacomo Cavedoni (1577-1660), and finally there is the Portrait of a Woman with its particular perspective, which presumably was a preparatory study for a larger work.
By contrast there are examples of the late Mannerism school such as Portrait of my Daughter, Maria Caterina signed and dated 1612 by the Genoese artist Giovanni Battista Paggi (Genoa 1554-1627), which is strongly influenced by the light concepts of the Venetian and Tuscan schools.
Two small 'virile' portraits in identical decorated circular frames are interesting. These have the pleasing haughtiness typical of the North European schools of Peter Paul Rubens and Anton Van Dyck. The Portrait of a Prelate and the Portrait of Vittoria della Rovere also belong to these schools. They present the sumptuous and solemn climate of the 17th Century and its dominant religious and aristocratic classes. In the Portrait of a Noblewoman, attributed to the Flemish artist Justus Sustermans (1597-1681), the meticulous care with which the richness of the fabrics and the value of the jewels are presented is particularly striking.
Finally the Portrait of a Man (with a wig) and the Portrait of Contessa Anna Maria Graneri, both from the 18th Century, show the influence of the French school, with its airy and cloudy use of colour and its delicate intimacy, accompanied by the use of Rubenesque colours and also the type of brushwork of the 16th Century Venetian school. |
