GHISLANDI, Giuseppe

The Bergamasque artist Vittore Ghislandi underwent a long apprenticeship in his two stays in Venice between 1675 and 1701, and combined the training received in Venice from the Baroque artist Sebastiano Bombelli and in Milan from Salomon Adler, still strongly influenced by Rembrandt, in a style of clearly realistic intentions, consonant with the great tradition of Lombard painting. Ghislandi exercised this predilection with incomparable strength in his portraits, of which the one depicting Count Giovanni Battista Vailetti is an excellent example. The nobleman’s proud good looks and his serene control over his feelings are rendered with exceptional vividness as he poses in the intimacy of his study. There is a definite Enlightenment flavour in the realistic rendering of appearances in the portrait and in the acute psychological analysis it embodies.

Francesco Maria Bruntino was a self-taught savant and antiquarian. He died in 1756, having spent his entire life and all his money collecting paintings, prints and fine books. Portrayed in a waist-length pose, with intense, shrewd expression, the man has ruffled hair and an unkempt beard, and wears an open shirt that indicates both his humble origins and his nonconformist disposition.

The painting was originally executed in c. 1730 but it was significantly reworked by the painter in 1737.

Richness of colour and unfailing mastery of brushstrokes, combined with psychological intensity in capturing character, are the hallmarks of Ghislandi’s portraits. In this case the painting also carries moral undertones. Even when relaxing, which can be deduced from the way his clothes are loosened and the fact that he is not wearing a wig, the nobleman maintains his formal, pompously impressive poise. The wise-looking old man may well only be a servant, but his presence provides an alternative type of dignity to that of the count. He counter-balances the social and intellectual claims of the nobleman with a reminder of the common human virtues which need no titles.

Vittore Ghislandi was the son of a quadraturista and as a young man often helped his father paint the illusionistic perspective decorations in which he specialized. Ghislandi took vows as first as a lay-brother and then as a friar in the Order of St Francis of Paola. After some time in the Paolotti Monastery in Venice he moved back home to the Galgario Monastery, whose name he adopted. We know little about his work as a painter before the beginning of the eighteenth century. By then he was over 40 years old and it may have been Salomon Alder who suggested that he start to concentrate on portraits. In any case he ended up specializing in them exclusively. Although he was abreast of what was going on in the creative worlds of Milan, Bologna, and Venice, he preferred to look for his inspiration to the local tradition in Bergamo, in particular to the work of Gian Battista Moroni. Thus started an abundant number of portraits of noblemen and ladies from the local aristocracy.

Fra Galgario showed no mercy in the way he starkly depicted their physical and moral reality. Fra Galgario’s portraits (some of which are in museums in Bergamo and Milan but most still in private collections) are extremely varied. This is thanks also to the richness of his palette and loaded brush. It was precisely this vivacity, combined with his sureness of composition and peremptory way of capturing the sitter’s psychological make-up, that makes the Bergamo portraits a faithful mirror of provincial life in the eighteenth century.

In this portrait the gentleman represented wears a tricorn hat bordered by a silver decoration; his face is framed by a grey wig secured to the neck by means of a black ribbon resembling a fashionable tie. Underneath the silk jacket we can recognise a metallic waistcoat bearing the stem of a knight order, specifically a red cross with four lilies. This was the symbol of the Holy Constantinian Order of St George, a group linked to Byzantine traditions which in the early eighteenth century had many followers in northern Italy. However, the precise identity of the man represented is still unknown.

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The subject is believed to be a nobleman, a member of the Tassi family of Bergamo. In this late painting, Ghislandi rejected the refined colour schemes of his youthful portraits. His palette is now concentrated on golds, whites, browns and intense, velvety blacks. His optical inventiveness is fresh, and in the folds of a scarf, in the braid of a cuff or lapel, he succeeded in creating enchanted Rococo notes.

The present portrait of a youth, bust-length, wearing a red hat and sash, is an autograph version of the painter’s prototype in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. The sitter is most likely identifies as one of the altarboys associated with the convent in which the artist lived.

The self-portrait, signed and dated at lower right, depicting the seventy-seven-year-old painter, was originally destined for the Uffizi in Florence, where it would have been included in the famous gallery that exhibited the portraits of the most celebrated painters. Placed on the easel behind the painter is a canvas bearing the sketch of a youthful figure who is perhaps identifiable as a pupil of Ghislandi, who died in the Galgario convent at the age of only twenty-two.

From the 1710s, Ghislandi depicted eccentrically garbed young men, often represented as painters or sculptors with their respective tools. The artist always created these paintings based on the observation of real models, however, these canvases were not regarded as true portraits but lovely genre paintings.