Doppio ritratto

Pietro Paolini

Medium: Signed 'Pietro Paolini' in the book on the left, Olio su tela

Dimensions: 116 × 177.5 cm

The scene takes place in a softly lit interior. In the background is a bookcase, on whose shelves closed and open books are piled, and on which a herm is placed. In the foreground, seated around a table, are a mature, bearded male figure, on the viewer’s left, and a young man, on the right. The older man is seated on a richly decorated, solid wooden chair. On the table are further closed and open books. The young man leans on the pile of books before him. On this pile of books are two folded sheets; on one of them the painter’s signature can be read. Both figures look towards the viewer and point to a large open book placed in front of the bearded older man.

The older figure may perhaps be identified, in view of the mutilated inscription at the far left, as the Lucchese poet Stefano Coli, who was bound by friendship to Pietro Paolini, the author of the painting. Sold by the Mansi family around 1950 and remaining in a private collection in Lucca until 1991–1992, this painting is to be identified with the one that Marquis Raffaello Mansi Orsetti sent in 1921 to Lucca for the exhibition dedicated to the Lucchese painter, and the following year to Florence for the exhibition devoted to Italian painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also appears in a nineteenth-century manuscript inventory (A.S.L., Mansi, 317, n.n.) and in Enrico Ridolfi’s Guida di Lucca (1871, p. 68).

From a stylistic point of view, the painting can be dated to around the middle of the seventeenth century, that is, to the mature phase of Paolini’s production. To this period belong a number of portraits marked by the same striking naturalism as the two figures represented here: comparisons may be drawn with the Portrait of a Man, formerly in the Marchesi collection in Rome, or with the Man Writing by Lamplight in the Mazzarosa collection in Lucca.

In the portraits of this period, the artist not only captures his sitters in their psychological individuality, but also invests them with symbolic meanings, always connected with the separation between earthly life and spiritual life, active life and contemplative life. Paolini reworks themes he had already addressed earlier, while depriving them of the dramatic tension and incisive effects of light derived from the Northern naturalism he had absorbed in Rome, which characterise his youthful works.