Northern Italian school; second half of the 17th century.

Northern Italian school; second half of the seventeenth century.
"Portrait of a cardinal".
Oil on canvas.
It presents Repainting, losses of the pictorial layer and restorations.
Measurements: 131 x 96 cm.
In this canvas is represented the cardinal dressed with all the symbols of his rank, with the hood on his head and his hands resting on the armrest in a rich armchair. In the background, there is a large crimson curtain gathered in the upper right corner, all these symbolic and scenographic elements remain in the background, since the painter concentrates the protagonism and the viewer's attention on the face of the character. His expression is friendly and open despite his rigid posture; he looks directly at us and smiles. The chromatism, around the red tones typical of the cardinal's clothing, is combined with highly nuanced whites and the ochre and earthy tones of the background, unified under a naturalistic atmosphere, inherited from the experiences of Velázquez. It is a fundamental aspect of 17th century portraiture to transmit the personality and mood of the sitter, which was not expressed in previous periods focused exclusively on external appearance. Naturalism advocates the non-idealization of the countenance. The cardinal's face is directly illuminated, his features are modeled through a soft gradation of light and shadow, and the brushstroke becomes shorter and more controlled, more descriptive and closer to the drawing.
Faced with the exuberant and elegant portrait, of virtuous and elaborate execution, at the beginning of the 17th century a general reaction was unleashed, based on compositional austerity and operational sobriety. Thus, as opposed to the desire for virtuosity of the previous century, Baroque portraitists recovered the previous models in a more sober and solid way, focusing on the characterization of the characters, the elegance of the poses and the delicate capture of the qualities of the different objects. The fact that this genre of painting developed in greater numbers is due to the commercial flourishing of these cities. This favored the beginning of an incipient bourgeoisie that gathered wealth, thus establishing itself in a higher social rank and favoring the development of a pictorial genre that favors pomp and personal recognition, such as the portrait.