Countess Catarina of Tomatis

Until 2020 this small head was catalogued simply as a portrait of a woman. The researcher Mariusz Pilus then compared it with a profile portrait painted about ten years earlier by Marcello Bacciarelli, court painter to the Polish king, and recognised the same blue eyes and the same nose. The sitter is Caterina Gattai Tomatis, a dancer from Milan who had been prima ballerina at the Warsaw opera in the 1760s. She married Count Carlo Tomatis, who had come to Venice to hire performers for that stage, and she had a long affair with King Stanisław August. Lampi painted her in Warsaw in 1788 or 1789, in oil on paper, and the museum thinks it may have been a study for a larger picture. The only sign of rank is the ermine collar beneath her loose brown hair.