Portrait of a man, long bust-length, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (?),
oil on canvas, 55.5 x 44 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Maison d’Art, Montecarlo;
Private collection, Belgium

Literature:
M. G. Aurigemma, Un ritratto berniniano, in: Arte Documento, no. 22, 2006, pp. 188–191 (as portrait of Gian Lorenzo Bernini by Jakob Ferdinand Voet, possibly on a sketch by Bernini himself);
T. Montanari, Bernini pittore, exhibition catalogue, Cinisello Balsamo 2007, p. 163, no. R24 (as Jacob Ferdinand Voet);
F. Petrucci, Ancora su Bernini pittore, in: Una vita per la storia dell’arte. Scritti in memoria di Maurizio Marini, Roma 2015, pp. 317–318 (as not by Bernini or Voet)

The present portrait of fine pictorial quality has been attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and it has been considered to be a self-portrait of the celebrated artist.

Maria Giulia Aurigemma (see literature) has suggested that this portrait was possibly begun as a self-portrait sketch by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in circa 1650–55, which was then subsequently completed by Jacob Ferdinand Voet in circa 1670 (it is possible, for example, that Bernini’s Self-Portrait now in the Uffizi was finished by Ciro Ferri, who acted as an intermediary in the sale of the painting by Leopold de’ Medici). Aurigemma has suggested that Bernini and Jakob Ferdinand Voet, who is documented in Rome between 1673 and 1678, frequented the same social circles, in particular the circle of Christina, Queen of Sweden. The portraits painted by Voet, such as that of Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, appear to be strongly influenced by Bernini’s pictorial production.

The attribution to Voet for the present canvas has also been endorsed by Tomaso Montanari (see literature), however, he does not accept the identification of the sitter as Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Francesco Petrucci does not accept the attribution to Voet, or that the sitter is Bernini, and he dates the present work earlier, to circa 1640, before Voet’s sojourn in Rome. The style of the clothing, a heavy black tunic from which a starched white collar emerges, can be seen in other portraits of the 1630s and 1640s, such as Jan Miel’s Self-Portrait or that of Jan van den Hoecke, both in the Koelliker collection in Milan (see F. Petrucci, Pittura di Ritratto a Roma. Il Seicento, Rome 2008, I, p. 201, fig. 286; p. 216; fig. 304) and where the moustache and beard are also similar.

Roman portraiture in the first half of the seventeenth century was diverse, due to the presence of artists from various regions of Italy and Europe in the city; the codification of the genre only occurred in the second half of the century, with the birth of specialised workshops, among which those of Giovanni Maria Morandi, Carlo Maratti, Ferdinand Voet (not by chance nicknamed ‘Ferdinand of Portraits’) and Baciccio were prominent.

A fundamental influence in the development of portraiture in Rome are Bernini’s pictorial portraits, which constituted an important part of the artist’s production in relation to his extraordinary sculptural portraits. In his canvases, the person portrayed is almost always shown in three-quarter profile, with an extreme naturalness, almost in the act of turning towards the observer; contemporary sources record that the artist did not usually make his models ‘pose’, but rather invited them to move and converse, in order to better capture their expressions and vitality. Also fundamental to the development of portraiture in the city was Diego Velázquez who was documented in Rome in 1630, and again between 1649 and 1651, contributed to fueling a dynamic artistic scene, which for the genre of portraiture still remains to be fully investigated.