(Maubeuge circa 1588–1667 Venice)
Portrait of a nobleman, long bust-length, as Aeneas, holding a branch of golden laurel,
oil on canvas, 70 x 56.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Antelminelli collection, 17th Century;
and thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited:
Sapporo, Hokkaido Museum of Art, 12 August – 14 October 2019/Nagoya, Museum of Art, 26 October – 15 December 2019/Osaka, Abeno Harukas Museum of Art, 26 December 2019 – 16 February 2020, Caravaggio. La verità dell’arte, cat. no. 38 (as Nicolas Régnier)

Literature:
Caravaggio. La verità dell’arte, ed. by L. Ficacci, S. Osano, exhibition catalogue, 2019, cat. no. 38 (as Nicolas Régnier)

We are grateful to Annick Lemoine for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a photograph.

This portrait represents a young man with shoulder length hair and a goatee beard, holding a branch of golden laurel. The allegorical meaning of this portrait is underlined by the sitter’s gesture emphasising the branch he bears, and the classicising appearance of his red mantle, while the rendering of his features and his style of hair indicate a date around the mid-seventeenth century. The subject is depicted as Aeneas, who, according to the events described by Virgil in the Aeneid (VI, 136-147) descended into the underworld, at the behest of the Cumean Sybille, bearing a branch of golden laurel sacred to Proserpine, the Queen of the Underworld, which he had been able to procure thanks to the assistance of his mother, Venus.

The present painting can be dated to Nicolas Régnier’s Venetian period. The artist spent the latter half of his life, from 1626, in Venice, establishing a flourishing studio and forging commercial and artistic ties. The present painting can be compared to certain works dated between 1647 and 1660, notably the Portrait of Giovanni Paolo Widmann in a Venetian private collection (see A. Lemoine, Nicolas Régnier, Paris 2007, p. 292, cat. no. 117), and above all, owing to the sitter being shown in an all’antica costume, the Paris, conserved in a Bolognese private collection and dated by Annick Lemoine to the late 1650s (see A. Lemoine, op. cit., p. 306, cat. no. 142).

The features of the sitter are rendered through the modulation of light and tone, with the shadows falling to the right. The subject looks out at the spectator decisively, thereby engaging an exchange with the space beyond the picture plane. This illusionistic expedient was used by post-Caravaggist artists working ‘from life’ in Rome during the first decades of the seventeenth century. Here the so-called ‘tenebrist’ painters developed the characteristics of their maturity, including the use of bright, sensual colour, reflecting their assimilation of the late renaissance Venetian tradition, and its seventeenth century evolution.

The sitter in the Portrait of Giovanni Paolo Widmann seems to share similar facial features to the protagonist of the present painting, however, the sophisticated style of the present painting and the pictorial quality is much closer to that of the Paris – which represents a youth with soft fleshy features offering a golden apple to the spectator beyond the picture frame – it deploys the same compositional trope as in this Aeneas. Indeed, Régnier had used this compositional technique before, since his time in Rome, where, from the early 1620s he frequented the ambit of The Bentvueghels.

Following a period at the Farnese court of Parma where he is documented in 1616, Régnier reached Rome sometime around 1620 when records document him as living in the parish of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, with ‘Davide fiamengo pittore’, ‘Teodoro fiamengo’ and Giovanni Antonio de Clericis, a Piemontese painter (see A. Lemoine, op. cit., pp. 61-67). Annick Lemoine identified the two artists as David de Haen and Dirk van Baburen, both of whom, alongside Régnier frequented the circle of The Bentvueghels and benefited from the protection of Vincenzo Giustiniani. The close proximity with which they moved between the excesses of street life, and the restraint of palace life among the aristocracy, defined them as among the most original and interesting personalities of the Roman art scene during the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. At this time the Caravaggist vein of painters began to formulate new and surprising forms, crossing into the allegorical and intellectual terrain of the classicist painters (see A. Lemoine, F. Cappelletti, Introduzione, in: Bassifondi del barocco, exhibition catalogue, Rome-Paris 2014-2015).

If, as it appears, Régnier served as a groom when he was in Parma, it would suggest that he was not at that time able to fully support himself as an independent painter, however, once he reached Rome, his career as an artist was fully assured. By 1622 Vincenzo Giustiniani had come to know and appreciate his qualities as painter since his arrival in Rome and in the 1638 inventory of Giustiniani’s collection there are nine paintings by Régnier – the largest group of works by a single artist after the fifteen by Caravaggio and the thirteen by Ribera. Following his departure from Rome, where in the ambit of Palazzo Giustiniani the painter had acquired both a realist technique and a modern and innovative outlook on the classical world, he moved to in Venice. Here, Régnier was to find new forms of expression in the wake of innovations by Domenico Fetti and Johann Liss, creating an interesting stylistic combination of the glories of the Venetian past and the latest aspects of modernity.