Portrait of a Woman

Genoese by birth and training, Gaulli moved to Rome following the loss of his family from the plague at age eighteen. There, while working for a picture dealer (Pellegrino Peri, of Genoa), his paintings caught the eye of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, with whom Gaulli formed a close relationship; indeed, his mature style is inconceivable without the example of the great sculptor (see Francesco Petrucci, Baciccio: Giovan Battista Gaulli, 1639–1709, Rome, 2009, pp. 38–61). Bernini is reported to have furnished models for Gaulli and promoted the twenty-two-year-old artist for the prestigious commission to decorate the dome, vault, and tribune of the Jesuits’ mother church, Il Gesu, with a cycle of illusionistic frescoes—one of the landmarks of Baroque painting. Today Gaulli’s name is primarily associated with this quintessentially Baroque type of decoration, among which outstanding examples are the allegorical figures in the pendentives of Sant’Agnese in Piazza Navona (1665) and the vault of SS. Apostoli (1707). He also provided numerous altarpieces, not least for Bernini’s church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale and the Altieri family chapel that Bernini designed in San Francesco a Ripa. Gaulli became president of the Accademia di San Luca in 1674. Yet in the first place, his rise to fame was based on his portraits. Here again Bernini, whom Gaulli painted on several occasions, played a key role in promoting him. In his biography of the artist Lione Pascoli (Vite de’ pittori. . . moderni, Rome, 1730, vol. 1, p. 207) noted, "He painted all the cardinals, all the important people of his day who came to Rome and the seven popes who reigned from Alexander VII to Clement XI; and in this work he showed, in truth, great art and singular mastery." Pascoli further recounts that from Bernini Gaulli adopted the procedure of encouraging his sitters not to sit to him but to move about naturally, speaking and carrying on their affairs, since only in this way could he produce a true likeness and bring out the best qualities of the subject.

The results of this process were fundamental to the Baroque conception of portraiture and are in clear evidence in The Met’s ravishing portrait of a young woman—the most alluring of the artist’s rare female portraits (Petrucci, 2009, knew only five prior to the appearance of this one in 2014). Rather than being shown in the more conventional frontal or near-frontal view so often preferred by Gaulli’s contemporary, the fashionable society portraitist Ferdinand Voet (1639–1689), the sitter strikes an animated pose, with her body almost at a right angle to the picture plane and her face turned toward the viewer. Her head, with its beautifully coifed, raven-black hair, is framed by a cloud-like transparent scarf of a type that recurs in Gaulli’s portrait of Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese (see Petrucci 2009, A61). With her sidelong glance and seductive smile she engages the viewer, while with the delicate fingers of her right hand she coyly toys with the strings of pearls that, together with mounted jewels, ornament her plum-colored silk dress, trimmed with fur and embellished with lace. These features underscore her presentation as a beauty—a bella donna—such as we know were sometimes commissioned as series to decorate rooms (see F. Petrucci, Ferdinand Voet (1639–1689), detto Ferdinando de’ Ritratti, Rome, 2005, pp. 105–36). No such series is known to have been commissioned from Gaulli, but the picture by him that offers the closest analogies, both in qualitative as well as expressive terms, belonged to Giovan Giacomo Durini (1647–1707), the owner of just such a series of belle donne painted by Voet, probably in 1676 (see Petrucci 2009, A63). The sitter is unidentified and the work’s early provenance unknown, but it would seem to date to the 1670s, when Gaulli’s art showed those traits that C. G. Ratti ("Le vite . . . genovesi" [ms. 1762], ed. Raffaello Soprani, Genoa, vol. 2, 1797, p. 82) described as "una maniera armoniosa, vaga, e forte di colorito" (a harmonious style, beautiful and strongly colored). The hands, in particular, reveal the importance of Bernini’s example: see especially the hands of the sculptor’s representation of Truth on the tomb of Alexander VII (see fig. 1 above) or of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. The importance for Gaulli of these works by Bernini is noted by Petrucci (2009, p. 59), but there is a further reference to classical sculpture, such as the celebrated Medici Venus, which until 1677 was among the most admired antiquities to be seen in Rome (in 1677 it was sent from Villa Medici to Florence and is now in the Tribuna of the Uffizi).

Keith Christiansen 2014

sale, Sotheby's, New York, January 30, 2014, no. 46, to Saieh Bendeck, Baroni, and Moretti

Keith Christiansen. "La création tardive d'une collection de peintures baroques au Metropolitan Museum of Art / Creating a Baroque Collection at the Metropolitan Late in the Game." Aux origines d'un goût: la peinture baroque aux États-Unis / Creating the Taste for Baroque Painting in America. Paris, 2015, pp. 68, 72.

Keith Christiansen in "Recent Acquisitions, A Selection: 2016–2018." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 76 (Fall 2018), p. 37.