Long known in the literature on one of Europe’s greatest 18th-century portrait painters, this character head exemplifies Fra’ Galgario’s pictorial sensitivity, as well as his great psychological penetration.

The painting resurfaced in Bergamo on the occasion of the exhibition devoted to Fra’ Galgario and his world in 1955,¹ when it belonged to the collection of Arno Rota, and was subsequently included in the select show of privately owned paintings at the Galleria Lorenzelli presented by Rodolfo Pallucchini, then intent, together with Giuseppe Fiocco, on asserting the painter’s Venetian roots.² It was chosen shortly afterwards for the Turin show of the artist’s most significant works organised by one of his most sensitive and demanding art-critical interpreters in accordance with the vision of Lombard painting developed by Longhi.³ By that time it was part of the Valsecchi Collection in Milan, probably one of the works gathered together by the art critic and expert on Lombardy art Marco Valsecchi. 

Despite overall deterioration of the painted surface, the work preserves the specific characteristics of this dogged experimenter in the fields of technique and execution, as attested by the quality of the red lake pigments and the painter’s particular tendency towards the “active combination of colours” and “rich painting” with a “natural and sensitive effect”, to borrow the felicitous expressions of one of the first items in the ideal critical anthology on Fra’ Galgario published by the abbot Giovan Battista Angelini, his contemporary, in 1720.⁴ 

Long known in the literature on one of Europe’s greatest 18th-century portrait painters, this character head exemplifies Fra’ Galgario’s pictorial sensitivity, as well as his great psychological penetration. The young man’s melancholy expression is common to many others in his pictorial repertoire, a whole gallery of anxious youths who look at you with a liquid, confiding gaze and natural empathy. It is no coincidence that this painting was selected as one of the forty to be illustrated in the exhibition of the painter’s most significant works organised by the writer and art historian Giovanni Testori in Turin in 1970, who justly regards it as exemplifying the artist’s maturity and puts forward a suggestive interpretation, describing it as unforgettable in virtue of the young subject’s air of melancholy and gravity far beyond his years due to awareness of the uncertainty of human destiny. He speaks of the “great thing, bathed in the glow of dusk or twilight, that is the Young Man with a Red Cap of the Valsecchi Collection. Here echoes of a wound resound again and again on a heart now acquainted with life.”⁵

Alessandro Morandotti

¹ Bergamo 1955.

² Bergamo 1967.

³ Testori 1970.

⁴ For the value of this source, see F. Frangi, “‘L’effetto naturale e sensitivo’: realtà ed espressione nella pittura di Fra’ Galgario”, in Bergamo 2003-04, p. 47.

⁵ Testori 1970.