(Bergamo 1655–1743) Portrait of an artist, 112 x 84 cm, framed,

Certificate: We are grateful to Prof. Francesco Frangi for confirming the attribuition of the present painting to Fra Galgario on the basis of a photograph; he dates it to the first years of the 18th Century.

In his right hand, the sitter holds a precious, presumably Venetian, glass from whose foot dangles a double gold chain extending over his body and held in his left hand, probably attached to a gold medal at the far end. This type of gold chain, the so-called „victor‘s chain“, was awarded to deserving artists by members of the nobility. Its origins lay in the big Italian art contests of the Renaissance.

Fra Galgario was probably the most important portraitist of the Italian settecento. He was a student of Sebastiano Bombelli in Venice and created an unforgettable gallery of faces and outstanding European personalities. In each of his portraits, he combined brilliant and subtle colours with a liberal brushwork that grew even more intense from year to year, until it burst the boundaries of drawn outlines. His anonymous portraits are genuine still lifes of the human face achieving the utmost degree of painterly expression.

Certificate: We are grateful to Prof. Francesco Frangi for confirming the attribuition of the present painting to Fra Galgario on the basis of a photograph; he dates it to the first years of the 18th Century. In his right hand, the sitter holds a precious