Chancellor Florius Senesius

In May 1935 Bologna opened an exhibition of its own 18th-century painting in 22 rooms of the town hall, with the art historians Roberto Longhi and Guido Zucchini behind it and loans from as far as Germany and France. It gave particular weight to Giuseppe Maria Crespi, and this portrait hung there as number 12, lent by Carlo Foresti, a collector in Milan. The show closed at the end of July, and the city's municipal art collections grew out of it.

Of the sitter almost nothing is known beyond the title, a chancellor named Florius Senesius. A chancellor in an Italian city of the time was the official who drafted and kept the records of a court, a guild or a church body, and the museum's record does not say which office he served. The museum dates the canvas to about 1730 to 1740, when Crespi was between his mid-sixties and mid-seventies. By 1939 it belonged to Jacob Heimann, a New York dealer, who sold it to the museum in 1945.