A newly found portray by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is to be unveiled in December at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Recognized primarily as a sculptor and architect, Bernini’s work are uncommon, with fewer than 20 accepted as genuine. He by no means signed his work, making attributions difficult.
The Vienna portray, Portrait of an Previous Man, depicts the almost life-size head and shoulders of an aged man with dishevelled white hair, set in opposition to a darkish background. His intense gaze is directed on the viewer, giving the work vitality. Till very lately, the museum attributed the portrait to an nameless Seventeenth-century artist working in Rome.
Portrait of an Previous Man entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1920 as a piece by the Paris-based painter Philippe de Champaigne. It was bequeathed by the Viennese collector Richard Lieben, who had purchased it in 1900, and earlier than that it was with Baron Engelshofen. Nothing is thought of its early provenance.
Since 1920, the portrait has been variously attributed to an nameless Italian artist, to the French artists De Champaigne or Jean Jouvenet, and to the Flemish artists Jakob Ferdinand Voet or Erasmus Quellinus the Youthful. Extra lately, the Italian painter Baciccio, Bernini’s collaborator, has been proposed.
With out a agency attribution, the Vienna portrait was banished to the storeroom in 1989. It’s not thought-about sufficiently necessary for inclusion among the many 2,800 work catalogued on the museum’s web site.
In relation to relationship, the Kunsthistoriches Museum’s curator Gudrun Swoboda believes the person’s garment and collar, in addition to his hair type, mirror Rome fashions of round 1670.
Detecting Bernini’s hand
Swoboda’s strongest arguments in favour of the Bernini attribution are comparisons with accepted work, drawings and sculptures. She believes that the artist of the portrait paid particular consideration to creating a way of house, with an observant eye for anatomy, particularly the cranium and facial muscle tissue.
The mouth of the outdated man within the portrait is barely open and his lips are moulded with precision. Swoboda sees this because the work of an artist with “a way of the sculptural”. She additionally sees parallels with Bernini’s masterpiece bust of Louis XIV (now at Versailles), notably within the corners of the mouth.
Swoboda says the layers of paint within the face had been utilized within the method of a sculptor “build up and modelling a face in clay”, utilizing a large number of quick bristle-brush strokes of paint. With the moustache, the artist is “sculpting with the comb”, she says.
There are stylistic parallels between the painted portrait and a wonderful self-portrait drawing within the UK’s Royal Assortment dated to 1675-80. The sunshine that falls from above at a steep angle, in addition to the dynamic of the collar and the alert gaze, are equally dealt with within the two works.
It’s often assumed that Bernini ceased to color round 1650, 20 years earlier than the museum’s portrait, which makes the museum’s attribution controversial. Nonetheless, a scattering of paperwork point out later work, finished in Rome.
Though the pinnacle and collar within the portray are very finely painted with daring brushstrokes, the black garment and the sitter’s proper shoulder are weaker. Swoboda subsequently believes that the face was finished by Bernini and the decrease half by one other artist, presumably certainly one of his sons. A current scientific examination of the portray confirms that it was executed by two completely different fingers.
And who’s the aged man? In his later years, Bernini solely labored for associates or dignitaries, which suggests somebody from the palace milieu in Rome or a befriended mental. The clothes may also point out a statesman or scholar. Swoboda speculates that it might be Mario Chigi (1594-1669), a brother of Pope Alexander VII. Mario Chigi was a former navy chief and Bernini’s most necessary late patron.
Rethinking Bernini’s profession
Though historic sources doc that Bernini accomplished as much as 200 work (principally portrait research), solely round 16 surviving works are broadly accepted by specialists—and all date from between 1620 and 1640, aside from one from round 1666. If the Vienna portray’s new attribution is accepted, together with a date of round 1670, then this can radically reshape our conception of Bernini as a painter. By this yr, Bernini was himself an outdated man, aged 71, however he went on to dwell to 81, an incredible age on the time.
Portrait of an Previous Man would be the centrepiece of a Kunsthistorisches Museum exhibition at Vienna’s Palais Lobkowitz, Bernini: Painter and Sculptor (2 December-4 April 2027). Exterior loans are to incorporate the Galleria degli Uffizi’s Bernini self-portrait portray (round 1635) and the Royal Assortment’s self-portrait drawing. Though different specialists have lately been privately invited to touch upon the Vienna portrait, the present, with different comparable works, will hopefully present a possibility to achieve a definitive judgement on the attribution.
