Portrait of Count Luigi Archinto

Austria took Milan back in 1814, and in 1815 Pelagio Palagi moved there from Rome and set about winning the city's portrait commissions. In 1817 alone he painted the Austrian emperor Francis the First, the nobleman Francesco Arese Lucini in his study, and this member of the Archinto family, one of the oldest noble houses of Lombardy. The sitter is Count Luigi Archinto, then in his seventies and head of the family, and that is how the Turin foundation that owns the canvas, the Fondazione De Fornaris, records him. The gallery's catalogue gives his name as Carlo, the name of his cousin and predecessor at the head of the house, who had been dead for more than a decade by 1817. The foundation's own note points to the sumptuous clothes and the elegant setting, chosen to show the standing of that old Lombard family.