Potrait of a Painter

Provenance: Bergamo, Daniele Farina; Farina heirs.

The canvas, direct provenance from the legacy of Daniele Farina (1807-1886) among Piccio’s main collectors and patrons, constitutes an unpublished find in the artist’s catalog since it was not surveyed in the two main catalogs – the first curated by Pierluigi De Vecchi in 1994 and the second by Renzo Mangili in 2014 – of the painter’s production.Piccio’s relations with the Farina family and, in particular, with the engineer Daniele Farina (1806-1896), are amply documented by the flourishing memoirs around the artist’s life. An engineer and architect, Daniele Farina likely met Piccio in the first half of the 1830s in Milan, the city where he had married his wife Amalia Elia and frequented in the same years by the artist, who from 1835 had taken studio in the famous block of Via San Primo known as the artists’ house. It was precisely in Milan that Daniele Farina had had the opportunity to follow the birth of the painter’s most contrasted masterpiece, the Agar Altarpiece for the church of Alzano of the early 1930s, as emerges from the words expended by Giovanni Moroni Pesenti when the affair of the Agar in the Desert, after the final realization of the altarpiece only in 1863, took on the tones of a real town dispute connected with the disruptive pictorial manner of the artist that so disconcerted the ecclesiastics of Alzano as to lead them to reject the work.

On that occasion, Pesenti recalled the support that he, together with Daniele Farina and Franco Cometti, had lent to the artist who was about to make some of the preparatory sketches for the work: “After the long and repeated speeches together also with your compatriot friends Ing. Daniele Farina, and Eng. Franco Cometti, held in Milan in the years 1835-36-37, as soon as you had received the commission for the painting, on the merit and concept of the sketches you had made, encouraging you to execute the ‘undertaking that to your way of seeing was very arduous by comparison with other paintings of the most distinguished ancient and modern painters who adorned the same chapel”.¹ It is not surprising, given the patronage relations that had existed between Farina and Piccio since those dates, that at the time of the definitive rejection of the canvas by the parish of Alzano, it was Daniele Farina himself who took over the acquisition of the canvas, first through a company and finally individually, becoming its owner in May 1864, which remained in the family collection at least until after the 1820s. The relations between Piccio and the Farinas continued, as seen, well beyond the Milanese beginnings and, indeed, found their continuation even more solid after Daniele Farina moved to Bonate di Sotto, near the Brembo River, where the engineer resided in a rustic villa at whose entrance a plaque recalls: “Giovanni Carnovali known as Piccio the distinguished painter of the nineteenth century drew inspiration from dreams of art that gave him fame in the rural peace of this house opened to him as a hospitable home by his friend and patron Daniele Farina.” It was in this very mansion that Piccio was several times a guest thanks to the patron’s helpfulness, portraying the various members of the family following up on one of his most pronounced inclinations, and appreciated by the small but solid circuit of patrons and collectors from Bergamo and Cremona, which was precisely that related to portraiture.To account for the intensity of the relationship between the Farina family and Piccio, there remains evidence of the substantial nucleus of works – including portraits, the famous “sketches” of sacred and mythological themes, as well as variations on the subjects most sought after by collectors such as the madonnas from the capitals – collected or directly commissioned by patrons and converged in the very rich family collection whose consistency is, in part, reconstructible thanks to the inventory drawn up in 1921 by the consultant Mario Pelliccioli before the final dispersion of the collection into the various branches of inheritance².Although the canvas presented here is not unambiguously recognizable in one of the works listed in the 1921 inventory³, Piccio’s paternity succeeds confirmed both by its direct provenance from the Farina inheritance and by the quality of the pictorial style close to some of the happier results of Piccian portraiture, such as the Portrait of Daniele Farina (since 2017 received as a testamentary legacy to the Repossi Picture Gallery in Brescia), variously referred by scholars to the mid-1830s (Piatto 1998, no. 46) or to the mid-1840s (Mangili 2014, I/128).

The work Portrait of a Painter portrays a young man with a colorful bow who, holding a brass quill for drawing in charcoal, turns his penetrating gaze to the viewer. With its tone of immediacy and colloquiality, the portrait fits into that vein of direct participation in the real, purged of the narrative courtship dictated by certain taste for the set portrait of portraiture in vogue in Romantic Lombardy between Molteni and Hayez. An ability to capture the real that, as Rossi has effectively summarized, translates into a transcription entrusted to “a linguistics of signs continually reinvented” in which it is no longer the description of the naturalistic datum that prevails, but the deeper rendering of “the sense of a look, a smile, a gesture.” It is precisely these most typical features of Piccian portraiture – those, moreover, that marked its success at its Milanese exhibition debut in 1838 – that are found in the painting under consideration: the immediacy of the attitude and the psychological depth of the gaze aimed at the observer become the pivot around which the emotional atmosphere of the portrait is built, according to a module later taken up by the artist in the later Ritratto del pittore Ronzoni (1858, Banca Popolare di Bergamo) marked, by this time, by that mobile and fuzzy brushstroke that characterizes the painter’s extreme production. The work under examination, differently, responds more immediately to the pictorial sensualities of Piccian painting in the 1830s and 1840s. Based on the dominant accord of brown and ashen tones between the monochromatic background, but traversed by subtle luminous vibrations, and the deeper values of the jacket and hair, the painting is brightened by the squillant notes of the blues, oranges and reds of the Levalliere tie which, together with the white of the shirt’s collar, chromatically raise the surface by directing attention to the young man’s face and hand thanks to the refined cross-reference between the blue of the fabric and that of the eyes pointed at the viewer. Through a soft, melted brushstroke, the painter builds up the volumes and subtle chiaroscuro plays without overly insisting on details: of extraordinary intensity are the rendering of the hand and the quill as pure forms stopped in their chromatic-bright appearance. Note how the brass pen is rendered with a light-imbued painting that with a few touches succeeds in suggesting the glinting of the metal in a delicate tone-on-tone play of the background grays.

The body of this pictorial material is counterbalanced, in the face, by a drafting that proceeds in veils giving an intense vitality and a surface vibration to the complexion of the face traversed by very subtle chromatic vibrations. As is the case in other portraits, see the comparison with that of Daniele Farina (fig.1), it is the painter himself who makes use of the light preparatory drawing and nib outlines as an integral part of the varied pictorial drafting, leaving, where necessary, shine through the marks below the subtle overlays of color that comes to graze generating plays of light that can suggest the softness of the hair and the truth of the epidermis, making palpable the presence of an atmosphere that makes the contours elusive and the forms vanish. The effect achieved is that of an intense truth of vision, the true core of Piccio’s research, in an effigy that does not appear fixed, but traversed by a vital tremor that through painting takes on an emotional component that psychologically charges the portrait. The apparent character of a drafting conducted at a non-final level of finishing, therefore, responds to a precise characteristic of the artist’s painting that, precisely through the play of the transparencies of the glazes, of the dialogue between pictorial drafting and preparatory drawing and the surface of the canvas aimed at the restitution of more immediate relationships of color and light that, in the work as in almost all of Piccio’s portraiture, culminates in the magnetic evidence of the physiognomic elements, from the lips stopped in an expression that seems mobile, indefinite, with the profile barely marked by a light nib mark and the color that fibrillates, up to the eyes that stand out from the eyebrow arch while a quick and synthetic mark summarizes the design of the eyelids.

1 Dearest Piccio!, “Arts and Crafts,” a. IV, no. 83, Sept. 4, 1863, s.p.

² Unpublished drawings by Giovanni Carnovali il Piccio. Second collection with 422 reproductions and unpublished documents, Edizioni “Monumenta Bergomensia,” Bergamo 1974, pp. 9-10.

³ It should be noted that the canvas underwent a recanvassing intervention in the middle of the last century that may have altered, in a limited way, the original measurements.

Niccolò D’Agati