Description:
Portrait of a friar of the Dominican order, as indicated by the cross on his chest and the lining of the characteristic hood turned up on his shoulders.
The painting is datable to the last quarter of the 17th century and should be attributed to an artist close to the Venetian Sebastiano Bombelli.
The ability to quickly grasp the "character" of a person from their features and to instantly render the sincere vivacity of the face, together with rapid and confident painting, are characteristics of Sebastiano Bombelli's portraiture that were assimilated by the best collaborators in his workshop. In addition to vitality, immediate expressiveness, and communicative aptitude, the methods of execution, with the chiaroscuro of the face rendered with the preparation of the background, also point to Bombelli.
It is known that among the artists who worked for a long time in his workshop was also Vittore Ghislandi from Bergamo, known as Fra' Galgario (1655-1743), who lived and worked in Venice between 1675 and 1702, with a brief interruption, according to Tassi, only in 1678. Bombelli's expressive mechanisms played an important role in the maturation of that aptitude for communicative immediacy that characterizes Fra' Galgario's characters.
Collaborating as a subordinate in Bombelli's workshop, the friar conformed his way of painting to that of the owner, to the point that almost nothing of his production in the 25 years spent in Venice has been identified, and there is a lively debate as to what his real expressive figure was and which portraits can be attributed to him during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
The possibility that the portrait in question belongs to the Venetian production of the young Fra' Galgario deserves to be considered also by virtue of the comparison with another portrait of a Dominican, certainly by the hand of the friar, made in old age (1735) and now at the Museo Civico in Udine.
The painting presented here was originally inscribed in an oval, subsequently reduced to the current rectangular shape of cm.60x42; apart from the reduction, the state of conservation is very good, with limited restorations for color losses in marginal areas.
