Fra Galgario

Giuseppe Ghislandi took his religious name from the monastery of Galgario, on the edge of Bergamo, where he settled in 1702 as a friar of the Minim order. He was already 50, and almost every portrait we admire today comes after that date, painted from behind cloister walls.

He had learned the trade in Venice, where he spent more than 20 years with Sebastiano Bombelli, a portrait specialist, absorbing the silvery light and rich fabrics of Venetian painting. Back in Bergamo, then a city of the Venetian Republic, he turned that training on the local nobles, merchants and fellow painters who came to sit for him. He read a face closely, down to the stubble and the tired eyes, and set it against loosely painted, glittering coats and sashes.

His fame travelled far beyond his cell. In 1717 the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, a leading art academy, made him an honorary member, and he had earlier declined an invitation to Rome from Cardinal Ottoboni, one of the great collectors of the day. One subject he returned to was a young man in the elaborate costume of a Bergamo gentlemen's society, a face he recorded without flattery.