Day 238 - Portraits by Ceruti and Mengs

February 22, 2021

For weeks I have been walking through Gallery 620 en route to other galleries, noting that it is home to a work I have known all my life: Goya's portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga (the small boy in a red suit who holds on a tether his pet magpie, which three wide-eyed cats watch attentively).  It is featured in Alice Elizabeth Chase's Famous Paintings,  a wonderful art primer for children that I loved as a child and that now sits on my coffee table.  (Betsy supervised my father when he held a student job at the Yale Art Gallery.)  Readily noticeable, too, is an appealing picture of a simply clad young woman holding a dog by Giacomo Ceruti, a Milanese painter whose dates are 1698-1767.

The surprise element of today's entry is that the paintings I'm drawn to write about are not these two familiar works but two portraits that I had never noticed before, one by Ceruti and the other by Anton Raphael Mengs.  Once I really looked at these works,  however, it was hard to take my eyes off of them, because the figures in the paintings do not take their eyes off of us and because the artists  have refused to prettify their subjects. 

Ceruti's "Old Man with a Dog." which measures about 30" X 20" and dates from the 1740s, shows a gray-bearded man holding a pug up to his face.  Both man and pet look out directly at the viewer.  Frown lines mark the man's forehead; his brows are bushy, his nose is long, his lips thin. His cheeks are flushed in a way that seems more indicative of a fever than of good health.  I can't say that the painting provides me with insight into the social status or psychology of the sitter, but the work is compelling in its realism. 

I had never heard of Mengs, who was born in 1728 in Bohemia and died in 1779 in Rome, and was abashed to learn from the caption that, "he became the most important painter in Dresden, Rome, and Madrid in the third quarter of the eighteenth century." The caption goes on to say that while Mengs' portraits of prominent sitters exhibit delicacy and refined beauty, his self-portraits are "exercises in truthfulness."  In this 1776 self-portrait, which measures about 36" X 28," the painter portrays himself from the waist up; in his right hand, he holds a palette or perhaps a canvas. The painting's sober color scheme - the artist wears a plain gray smock; the plain background consists of various shades of brown - draws all our attention to the painter's long oval face, its high forehead marked by a protuberance. The painter looks uncertain and anxious; perhaps he was unwell. The work is disquieting and perhaps great for that very reason.