It is 1735. In a Bergamo still under the dominion of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, an elderly painter from Bergamo observes the painting he is finishing. The subject of the canvas is a young man portrayed wearing an elegant dove-colored jacket, lined with green fabric; the contrast between the white shirt and the black bow tie and the particular headgear, the tricorn, popular in 18th-century fashion, is evident. Captured in a half-figure pose, with his right arm resting on his hip, in a typical portrait pose, the young man seems about to fasten his jacket, holding a flap with his left hand, almost as if to present himself in a more formal manner suitable for the solemnity of the moment. The final glance he casts at his creator is almost impenetrable, halfway between disdainful and bored. The result is the fruit of a work that began in 1730, a piece that will become emblematic of the painter’s artistic maturity.
The Bergamasque Portraitist
The author is Giuseppe Ghislandi (1655-1743), better known by the nickname Fra Galgario, an artist born in Bergamo who spent a long period of training in Venice as a pupil and collaborator of the painter Sebastiano Bombelli, before returning to his hometown, where he settled in the Galgario convent, from which his famous nickname derives. He distinguished himself as a portraitist of the Bergamasque society of the early 18th century, demonstrating a particular intuition for the psychological rendering of his characters, whether they were of high lineage and wealthy or of humble origins, always maintaining a balance with the official portraiture of the time.
Fra Galgario and the Accademia Carrara
The work is Portrait of a Young Gentleman, an oil on canvas that, nearly three hundred years after its creation, has found its new home in the Accademia Carrara di Bergamo, an art gallery founded at the end of the 18th century by the will of Count Giacomo Carrara, whose collection includes about 1,800 works of art including paintings, sculptures, drawings, books, prints, and frames. This painting became part of the museum’s exhibition path only in the autumn of 2020 and is an entry on loan from the Regional Directorate of Museums of Lombardy.
The Accademia Carrara is already home to several works by Fra Galgario, thirty in total, and Portrait of a Young Gentleman has found its natural placement within room 21 of the museum, a space entirely dedicated to Lombard portraiture between the 17th and 18th centuries, in constant dialogue with other masterpieces by the artist, such as Portrait of Count Giovanni Secco Suardo with the servant and Portrait of a Young Painter. The work dates back to the most mature period of Fra Galgario’s painting and represents one of the most significant testimonies of his ability to perfectly unite the Venetian color tradition with the more typically Lombard attention to a depiction that was true and faithful to reality.
The Hidden Identity of the Gentleman
One can only wonder who the gentleman in the title was, but even today his identity remains uncertain. The painting was for decades inside Palazzo Marenzi, on Via Pignolo, and consequently, it has been hypothesized that it could depict a member of that family. It is worth noting, however, that the Marenzi family acquired the palace only at the beginning of the 20th century, while the painting dates back to the 1730s, a century during which the Tassi family was the owner of the palace. The most famous suspect belonged, in fact, to this dynasty: he is Count Francesco Maria Tassi, a friend and biographer of Fra Galgario, as well as a writer and author of the Lives of the Bergamasque Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
The crux of this assumption, first formulated in the 1920s by scholar Ciro Caversazzi, lies in the resemblance between the young man in the painting and an engraving prefacing the edition of the Lives in which Francesco Maria Tassi is immortalized, albeit at a more mature age. This hypothesis has found support from other voices, including that of art historian Franco Mazzini, but it does not definitively persuade, also due to the fact that Tassi himself did not recount, in the section of the Lives dedicated to his friend, that he had ever been portrayed by him.
In any case, it can be assumed, based on the collection history of the work, which has always remained in the city of Bergamo, that the young gentleman belonged to the local minor nobility, whose members became the main patrons and subjects of Fra Galgario’s portraits. In this regard, as Tassi recalled in the Lives, “…it cannot now be explained how everyone competed to have from him either portraits or those whimsical heads that made such a stir beyond the mountains…”.
