Eberhard Keilhau (Helsingør 1624 - Rome 1687)
Head of a Boy
Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 33 cm
Essay by Massimo Pulini
The small painting is executed with rapid, confident, and affectionate brushstrokes, which with little material manage to outline the parts of a boy's face exposed to light, leaving the reddish priming the task of tuning the intermediate shadows, reinforced only with some brown markings, which find their peak in the eyes. This expressive head is therefore limited to a few strokes of paint, which a wide-brimmed hat transfers towards the pauperistic genre of the Baroque period. Had it not been for this hint of costume, it could have been mistaken for an unfinished sketch by Simone Cantarini, so similar is the impetuous and fleeting approach that ancient chroniclers defined as "sparingly." The saving is, however, only in the chromatic material; in fact, the feeling and the vibrant, almost instantaneous, rendering of the boy are generous, and the painting seems to have captured his thoughts.
Few and astute artists have managed to condense such a density of soul into such minimal formal choices, and all the elements displayed, from the warm color to the vivid expression, from the poor subject to the rapid stroke, converge towards a precise artistic personality, that of the Danish Eberhard Keilhau, who during his thirty-year stay in Italy was called Monsù Bernardo.
