Portrait of a Young Man in Oriental Dress
Provenance
Sforza Cesarini Collection, Rome, by 1713 and until at least 1830.
with Galleria Gasparrini, Rome, in 1989
with Galleria Orsi, Milan
Private Collection, Rome
Bibliography
Caterina Volpi, ‘Considerazione sui filosofi nell’opera di Salvator Rosa e un inedito ritratto di giovane uomo vestito all’orientale’, in Stefan Albl and Francesco Lofano, eds., I filosofi nell’arte del Seicento. Stile, iconografia, contesti, Rome, 2017, pp. 355–66.
Essay
The Portrait of a Young Man in Oriental Dress, a recent and very important addition to the catalogue of Salvator Rosa’s portraits, can be dated on stylistic grounds to the years the painter spent in Rome, between 1650 and 1660. Ghezzi tells us in his memoirs that Duke Gaetano Sforza Cesarini lent the picture for an exhibition of paintings held in San Salvatore in Lauro in 1713.[1] The Sforza Cesarini inventory drafted in 1713 lists it as ‘73. Un quadro di p.i 2, e 1/2 ,e 2, e 1/2 rap.e una testa op.a di della scuola di Salvatore Rosa’ [‘73. A painting 2 ½ ft. by 2 ½ ft. showing a head, by the school of Salvator Rosa],[2] while the inventory of 1830 provides an even more accurate description of it: ‘Half-figure with head swathed in cloth 2 x 3 palms’ by Salvator Rosa.[3]
Though unpublished, the painting was listed by Federico Zeri in his photographic library as belonging to the Galleria Gasparrini in Rome in 1989.[4] Despite the painting being in excellent condition, cleaning has brought out the textural quality of the brushwork, the accomplished highlighting and the subtle, sophisticated nuances of an almost monochrome palette that reveals a masterly handling of the different shades of white. Restoration has also made it possible to recover the original rectangular format of the picture, which had been placed, at some unspecified date, in an oval frame that had greatly reduced its size.
Salvator Rosa was much in demand in the nine years that he spent at the court of Giovan Carlo de’ Medici, working intensely for the Medici family and for such court dignitaries and officials as Carlo Gerini and Filippo Niccolini. At the same time, however, he also made frequent appearances in performances set to librettos by friends such as Giovan Battista Ricciardi, and produced a considerable number of literary compositions inspired by Horace’s Satires.[5]. It was in those years, while frequenting the Florentine art scene, that Salvator Rosa also developed his superb talent as a draughtsman, perfecting his skill in the study and rendering of facial features and costumes which he studied directly on the stage. Abundant proof of this is found in his numerous pencil, pastel and sanguine drawings of expressive heads, or testacce as he called them, virtual portraits executed with a technique that owes a major debt to such Florentine artists as Francesco Furini, Jacopo Vignali and Lorenzo Lippi. They must also have served him as models for the figures he painted, and it was in Florence that he systematically began to use his own features and those of his friends for his allegorical portraits.
His production of self-portraits and portraits of friends did not cease when he moved permanently to Rome in 1651. In fact, as the letters he sent to Ricciardi prove, his output of testacce actually increased after he left Florence. This assiduous practice allowed him to become a truly sophisticated and intense portrait artist, producing portraits in which the sitter is depicted with ever greater psychological subtlety, without the need to resort to the kind of caricatural rendering that had been such a feature of the Neapolitan legacy he had embraced as a youth.
The half-bust, three-quarter depiction, the mysterious, melancholy face, the grave and measured pose, the oriental costume and the setting, a neutral background lit with raking light, make this picture a superb example of Rosa’s portraiture in the 1650s, after his return to Rome from Florence. It can thus be dated to the more or less same years as the very fine Portrait of Lucretia in the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini (inv. 1571; fig. 1), with which it shares dense brushwork that acquires a fuller texture in those details that the artist wishes to emphasize: an earring standing out against Lucretia’s black cloak, or a fold in the white turban worn by the young man in oriental attire. Rosa perfected this technique in Rome by observing the work of Pier Francesco Mola, Mattia Preti and Giacinto Brandi, but above all, after attending the Mostra dei Virtuosi, an exhibition held in the Pantheon in 1650 and seeing Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1971.86), a painting that marked an important turning point in Rosa’s portraiture in his mature years.
From that moment on, undoubtedly on account of his proximity with Mola and the latter’s neo-Venetian style, Rosa’s characters tend to include figures dressed in exotic, oriental attire sporting turbans and feathered hats. The young oriental sitter in this picture certainly displays a very close affinity with Pier Francesco Mola’s splendid Portrait of a Man with a Turban formerly in the Luigi Koellicker collection.❖
Caterina Volpi