Portrait of a sculptor

In early 18th-century Bologna, the painter to study under was Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose portraits and everyday scenes had a plain, unglamorous truth to them. Cristoforo Terzi trained in that studio, and you can feel it here. This is a working sculptor, shown with the tools of his trade rather than dressed up as a gentleman. We know the painter and we know the city, yet the man himself has slipped out of the record. No document names him, so the sitter who once mattered enough to be painted at half length is now simply the sculptor. The canvas entered the Uffizi through its long habit of collecting portraits of artists and of the people who worked around them.