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170
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Grotesque portrait of a young man wearing a red headdress Lo…
See original version (Italian)
170
-
Grotesque portrait of a young man wearing a red headdress Lo…
See original version (Italian)
Estimate €1,000 - €2,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Grotesque portrait of a young man wearing a red headdress Lombard School, early 18th century oil on canvas 43 x 32 cm
The painting depicts a young man from the common people in half-length portrait, shown full-face against a dark, neutral background, characterised by a highly exaggerated and theatrical expression accentuated by an uneven smile that reveals his teeth and a fixed gaze directed straight at the viewer. The figure wears a simple light-coloured shirt with vertical pleats and an eccentric red headdress adorned with feathered elements or decorative rods, which lend the image an ambiguous character, suspended between a folk portrait, a buffoonish figure and a physiognomic study. The painterly execution, achieved through a swift and concise brushwork dominated by deep browns and sudden flashes of light on the face and hands, places the work within the context of Lombard genre painting from the late 17th to the early 18th century.The image appears linked to the naturalistic tradition that emerged from the teachings of Annibale Carracci and the Bolognese Carracci circle, where the direct study of life, of folk expressions and eccentric physiognomies had given rise to a new interest in so-called ‘character heads’. This artistic tradition, which spread widely across northern Italy between the 17th and 18th centuries, found particular favour in Lombardy amongst artists drawn to an intense and non-idealised depiction of the lower classes and marginalised figures. This painting does indeed appear to preserve that Carracci legacy in its strong focus on physiognomic accuracy, the figure’s direct frontal pose and the psychological ambiguity of the expression, suspended between observation from life and caricatural distortion.In this context, the work shows significant affinities with the painting of Antonio Cifrondi, particularly in the expressive tension of the face, the energetic brushwork and the penchant for depicting ordinary people in almost theatrical poses. Similarly, the rough naturalism and the desire to emphasise the figure’s most irregular features recall the sensibility of Pietro Bellotti, an artist whose work was deeply engaged with the world of beggars, paupers and character studies. The unabashed and deliberately unsettling smile, rare in the official portraiture of the time, finds precise parallels in the tradition of grotesque heads and physiognomic studies derived from the Carracci circle and subsequently reworked in Lombard genre painting.The eccentric headdress also helps to reinforce the theatrical and carnivalesque element of the image, suggesting the possible depiction of a comic character, a jester or a deliberately exaggerated figure intended to appeal to collectors’ taste for the bizarre and the grotesque. The work thus stands as an interesting testament to the persistence of the Carracci school’s naturalistic culture in early 18th-century Lombard painting and to its transformation into a more popular, expressive and picturesque style within the tradition of painters of beggars and character heads.
See original version (Italian)
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