(Venice 1659–1714 London)
Portrait of an Admiral in armour,
oil on canvas, 82 x 65 cm, framed

Provenance:
possibly Collection of Marchese Mattias Bartolommei, Florence, 1760 (according to an inventory – see below)

Documentation:
Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Bartolommei, 587, Quaderno d’inventari della casa di Firenze, villa di Monte Vettolini, villa del Poggiale e villa d’Arcetri, 1760, n. 209: ‘Due quadri alti braccia 1 2/3 e larghi braccia 1 1/3, rappresentanti due ritratti vestiti alla spagnola, con cornice, intagliati a basso rilievo e dorati a mecca; che uno del Cassana, rappresentante un uomo armato’ [‘Two paintings, 1 2/3 braccia high and 1 1/3 braccia wide, representing two portraits in Spanish dress, with carved low relief frames entirely gilded; as well as one by Cassana representing a man in armour’]

We are grateful to Francesco Petrucci for confirming the attribution of the present painting.

The present portrait represents an elderly Condottiero dressed in armour and he is perhaps a general or an admiral. His hands rest on the marshal’s baton and he wears a porphyry red mantle. The iconography of the present work follows the seventeenth-century production of ‘character heads’ and ‘genre portraits’ in which a taste for the exotic and orientalising prevailed. This taste was exemplified in the works of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Pietro della Vecchia, Giuseppe Caletti, called il Cremonese, Salvator Rosa and Pier Francesco Mola. The stylistic language and pictorial character of the present portrait conforms to the work of Nicolò Cassana (Venice 1659–1714 London), who trained in Venice and operated in Florence, and was one of the most original portraitists of his age. Nicolò trained with his father, the painter Giovan Francesco (circa 1620–1690) who was a native of Cassana, the Ligurian village from which the family took their name, and in Venice he was apprenticed to Bernardo Strozzi.

The biographer Carlo Giuseppe Ratti reports that Nicolò was ‘un insigne Artefice, e distintamente nel far ritratti, nel che pochi ebbe quell’età, che l’uguagliassero’ [‘a distinguished Artist, and especially so in portraiture, in that few at his age, could match him’]. For this reason, he was called to Florence by Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici, who commissioned of him his own portrait, and those of others, in the traditional style, in military dress and even exotic set pieces.

Many portraits by Cassana were made in, or sent to, Florence, where he became court painter to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. His studio was frequented by the Venetian nobility and by illustrious travellers, such as Prince Frederick IV of Denmark (1708). After a sojourn in Dusseldorf where he remained at the court of the Elector Palatine until Spring 1711, he established himself in England. Here he spent the final years of his life as a portraitist and as a copyist of Old Masters, for which the British supplied a great demand; he collaborated frequently there with Sebastiano Ricci.

The present portrait can be compared to the Portrait of an old man with a fur in the National Museum, Warsaw, as well as to the Old Slav offered at Christie’s, Milan in 2006, on 7 June 2006, as lot 121, from the Castelli Collection, Venice (see F. Zava Boccazzi, Contributo alla ritrattistica di Nicolò Cassana, in: Arte Veneta, 38, 1984, p. 104, note 30). A possible studio copy of the present work is conserved in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, which was once in the Zambeccari Collection (see P. Delorenzi, in: Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna…, 2011, pp. 381–382, no. 230).

The light palette and the polished rendering of the features, suggest a dating around the first decade of the eighteenth century, when the artist had returned to Venice, and before his definitive departure from Italy.